The Last Garcia Márquez

Remember when the publication of a new novel by a Nobel laureate brought with it the sense that something monumental was happening in the world of literature? It’s not like I ran out and bought every new title by Morrison, Bellow, or Naipaul as soon as they hit the shelves (then again, sometimes I did), but I sure as hell knew about them. These titles offered a sense that the heart of literature beat strongly, that important writers were disseminating important words, that great stylists were busy in their celestial workshops and occasionally dropped a new title from above for our edification. We could read them, enjoy them, not like them very much, ignore them, or ridicule them (whether we’d read them or not), but there was no doubt they were there, classing up the place with their presence, offering a sense of the very top of the field for a young writer like me to strive for.

Alas, all of the great ones mentioned above have died, including Gabriel Garcia Márquez, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 and died in 2014. Despite the fact that he’s been gone a decade, a new novel by Márquez comes out this month, Until August, a compelling if quick tale about the married woman and mother Ana Magdalena Bach, who once a year leaves her comfortable life in a Caribbean city for a tourist-y island and, for one night, takes a lover.

People might have ridiculed such a pedestrian plot, even back in Márquez’s day. People regularly threw around the quote, “Adultery is a most conventional way to rise above the conventional,” generally ascribed to Vladimir Nabokov, to downplay the work of writers such as John Updike, who did not win the Nobel. Márquez, known as a founding practitioner of magical realism as featured in his groundbreaking novels One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, among others, doesn’t dip into his magical bag of tricks in Until August, unless you count the more of-this-earth trickery of a master literary stylist:

“She was depressed by the poverty of the village, where they had to sleep outside in hammocks slung between two coconut palms, despite its being the birthplace of a poet and a grandiloquent senator who had once very nearly been president of the republic. She was struck by the number of black fishermen with mutilated arms from the premature explosions of dynamite sticks.”

With realism like that, who needs magic?

So, a woman goes to a beautiful Caribbean island once a year, finds herself a cabana boy, and heads home with a smile on her face, right? That’s not the plan Márquez has for Ana. Her chosen men tend to be older, and none come across as the stuff of anyone’s dreams.

“He moved to her table and very stylishly poured her a shot. “Cheers,” he said. She perked up, and they both knocked back their drinks in one. He choked, coughed with his whole body shuddering, and was left with tears streaming down his face. They were silent for a long moment while he dried off with a lavender-scented handkerchief and recovered his voice.”

This first foray for Ana into adultery isn’t some kind of exotic break from her well-heeled life. It instead becomes the central focus of a dissatisfaction she didn’t know she had. Márquez was never in the business of making things simple for his reader, and God love him—and his estate—he doesn’t start now.

Ana’s dates don’t improve over the years, nor does her condition, to the point that Márquez’s efforts take on a feminist tone. Ana’s eighteen-year-old daughter seems to have none of her mother’s hang-ups. The daughter “was in the first flush of a fling with an excellent jazz trumpeter but was determined to take her vows with the Discalced Carmelites, against her parents’ will.” Ana seems nonplussed that her offspring has so much agency between lust and piety. Where’s mine? she seems to ask herself. Is it buried somewhere on that island, which also doubles as her mother’s final resting place? Isn’t Ana the one who should have the kind of freedom her daughter—not to mention her charming if unfaithful husband—experiences as a matter of course? Who’s the sucker here?

Márquez makes it easy to be concerned for Ana and her lack of fulfillment. She needs something besides the contentedness of her life, and such a need has portended tragedy for characters as far back as the Greeks. That’s the kind of pathos we should expect a Nobel laureate to deliver. Márquez and his like can make monumental things happen, even from the grave.