Salman Rushdie Defends the Legacy of Gabriel García Márquez

To publish or not the last novel that Gabriel García Márquez wrote before he died? Although it seems that the answer is simple and logical: YES!… It is really neither simple nor logical; It is way more than complex and has made me reflect on many topics…this beyond the fact that I personally am not a fan of the Colombian author’s work. But I must say that I am a great reader of an author who, when faced with the dilemma of whether to publish García Márquez’s posthumous book, responded with a resounding NO, and this author is Salman Rushdie.

I didn’t even know that in March 2024, 10 years after García Márquez’s death, a novel titled “En agosto nos vemos” (“Meeting In August,” in English) (Random House) will be published. Nor did I know that they found the manuscript at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, which keeps García Márquez’s literary archive. Or that many unpublished works by Salman Rushdie also rest that same place. Much less did I know that The New Yorker published a fragment of that novel in 1999. Now, why is Salman Rushdie so strongly opposed to the publication of that “Gabo” novel?

A few days ago they held Kosmopolis 2023 festival  Barcelona, ​​Spain and Rushdie offered a video interview from his residence in New York.  According to Rushdie, García Márquez did not want people to read that work since he wrote it with difficulty while he was suffering from dementia. “I’m worried about it reaching bookstores”. And he also added: “I can say from now on that at the University of Austin I have some somewhat overwhelming manuscripts that I do not want to be disseminated.” (Just in case). For Rushdie, the work does not show García Márquez at his best and its publication makes no sense.

Is it actually necessary?

Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, sons of García Márquez, approved the publication of the novel. In a statement, they have referred to Meeting in August as the author’s last effort to continue creating against all odds and the text had many and very enjoyable merits. Not to be negative, but this doesn’t sound like a description of anything truly memorable, at least not to the grandiose level achieved by García Márquez (again, I’m not a fan of his work, although if I’m really honest, I always admired his journalistic work and read all his novels, my problem is that I have never liked One Hundred Years of Solitude, that’s it).

The process of writing this novel (a story of love, passion or something like that) was apparently parallel to García Márquez’s declining mental condition. And thinking about the already inherent difficulties that writing represents for any author, except for machines like Stephen King or now these young BookTokers who are not interested in “literature” but in generating “content” that is easy and quick to market, sell and publish, I agree with Rushdie; If García Márquez did not want the novel out, what gives his two sons the moral right  to publish it?

The creation of art and literature is something as private, as personal as making love with one’s own essence. All authors know that there is much more to what one writes and does not publish than the public actually reads. Because the great odyssey of writing is.. writing; It is the achievement of the moment when a paragraph fills you with something that you can only explain through the word magic. And that was the magic that authors like Rushdie and García Márquez added to their true stories to conceive magical realism.

Therefore, what can the publication of this novel add to the legacy of someone like Gabriel García Márquez? Nothing. Just a publicity extravaganza for someone who always hated publicity extravaganzas. The book will release on the date of his birth, 10 years after his death. Someone might say it is a celebration/commemoration; a gift to his readers. So that? If readers couldn’t get enough of the enormous work this guy wrote, then they don’t deserve anything, not even a book that he didn’t even want them to see.

Each writer has his own internal, personal search. Both Salman Rushdie’s and García Márquez’s have been intrinsically intimate. And it is very curious that these two authors never met in person. Salman discovered the existence of García Márquez after the publication of Rushdie’s first novel, the almost-forgotten Grimus (1975); A friend suggested he read One Hundred Years of Solitude, after the first paragraph, Rushdie found himself in that same world.

Without knowing it, Salman Rushdie was already writing magical realism. He looked at himself in the mirror of Macondo and it transported to his childhood between India and Pakistan; The similarities were overwhelming; the colonels and generals he remembered with little affection; the tropical vegetation that so many times filled him with happiness; colonization that always, no matter where and how it occurs, is the arrival of others who do not belong to that place; the differences in social classes, poverty and the dreams of overcoming it… religion…Oh yes, religion, God…and the power that beliefs have in our lives.

On one occasion, Rushdie went to Mexico, he wanted to meet García Márquez, who lived in Mexico City. Rushdie was having dinner at the writer Carmen Boullosa’s house. Another great one accompanied them: Carlos Fuentes, who told him that García Márquez was in Cuba, with his pal Fidel Castro. However, he went to a room and made a phone call. García Márquez was on the other end of the line waiting to speak with Salman.

Between a little Spanish, a little English and French, Salman and Gabriel understood each other perfectly. Salman never forgot what to this day is the greatest compliment another writer has ever paid him:  “At my age,” Garcia Márquez said, “I no longer read very much outside the Spanish language. But there are two writers in English about whom I think, I want to know what they are doing. One of them is J.M. Coetzee, and the other is you.”

I applaud about Salman Rushdie as a human being: his ability to continue fighting for freedom, even for the freedom that García Márquez now cannot enjoy because they are publishing something that he did not want people to read. Rushdie is able to precisely separate in that fight for freedom of expression, and despite it having cost him almost his life, the fact that Gabriel García Márquez defended and was an ally and best friend of the Communist monster that exterminated freedom of expression in Cuba, Fidel Castro.

I am not as big as Salman, to say the least. But for his support for the Cuban regime, I will never forgive Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. Just as I do not forgive his two sons for daring to publish that novel.