© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Gabriel Garcia Marquez died in April 2014. We are told that in the last years of his life, Gabo, as he was fondly known, suffered memory loss which bothered him while writing. He had often said, “Memory is, at once, my source material and my tool. Without it, there’s nothing.” Though Until August was completed in June 2002, he had said, “This book doesn’t work, it must be destroyed.”
Fortunately, it wasn’t, and remained in darkness till his children, Rodrigo and Gonzalo Garcia Barcha, decided to reveal it to the world. On Gabo’s 97th birth anniversary, Until August came out, becoming another entry in his frequent fictional explorations of love between older people, just like in Memories of My Melancholic Whores (2005), his previous novel.
The essential Marquezian element is magical realism but, surprisingly, Until August doesn’t have it. It’s the story of Ana Magdalena Bach, a happily married woman in her fifties who makes annual visits to her mother’s grave in a remote Caribbean Island. The visits happen every August 16 on the death anniversary of her mother. Like most of Gabo’s characters, Ana is complicated and wracked by love, jealousy and contempt. She’s in league with many iniquitous characters from the Marquez canon like those in Big Mama’s Funeral (1962) to Death Constant Beyond Love (1970).
The supporting cast is equally interesting. Her 54-year-old husband is handsome, well-educated, and an inveterate flirt. Domencio Amaris is a music critic who believes that the work of great musicians has always been inseparable from their destinies. Her two children, a boy and a girl, make the story’s digressions readable.
Ana has multiple sexual encounters with strangers on her annual island visits, and the first stranger is of note. When he leaves her, he keeps a twenty-dollar bill between the pages of a book she is reading. Those twenty dollars singe Ana. They violate her and mark a change in her life when she returns home, realising her life has now irretrievably changed.
The book explores morality, infidelity and faithfulness. Ana’s anxiety each time she returns home from the island relates us to her desire. Her vulnerability is like the one Chekov explores in his short story, ‘The Lady with the Dog’ (1899), about a banker and young woman who start an adulterous affair and are forced to live apart for a while, before they meet again and realise that distance has only nourished their love. Her anxiety reminds me of Bell Hooks’s All About Love (1999), in which she writes, “The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces beyond our control.”
Literature is also used to prop up the book’s themes. Ana is often shown reading books relevant to the storyline, like Bram Stroker’s Dracula, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Silvina Ocampo’s The Book of Fantasy, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Lazarillo de Tormes.
Every page of Until August can be read with mesmeric peace. Human solitude is a weird space. For the fortunate, it can be effortlessly filled up by love and desire. That’s what forms the heart of this splendid novella.
But no literature is complete without an element of suspense and surprise. The book shouldn’t only be read for the magic of Marquez’s words and imagery but also for its climax. The end is as shockingly beautiful as the stunning pattern of a thunderbolt on a clear night sky.
Despite all the criticism against its publication, as a reader, I feel grateful to have been offered a chance to savour a Marquez that has traces of his writerly evolution over the years.
