Until August

Gabriel García Márquez

Translated by Anne McLean

Viking, £16.99

The late Scottish poet and essayist Alastair Reid deserves a mighty slap on the back for introducing many English-speaking readers to the work of Gabriel García Márquez. Writing in 1986 in the New Yorker, on whose staff he remained for around half a century, Reid hymned a generation of Latin and South American poets and novelists, including Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Mario Vargas Llosa.

However special attention was reserved for Colombian-born García Márquez, whose novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in Spanish nearly two decades before. It, and others like it, ushered in the literary genre that came to be known as magical realism, in which the fantastical and the real seem indistinguishable.

The success of One Hundred Years of Solitude confirmed García Márquez as one the great writers of the age. Though he was extraordinarily well read he always attributed his peculiar style to his grandmother who spoke of dead relatives as if they were still alive and who drew no distinction between actual events and legends.

By way of illustration he recalled how, when he was about five years old, an electrician was called to their house. “He came a number of times. On one of them, I found my grandmother trying to shoo a yellow butterfly from the kitchen with a cloth and muttering. ‘Every time that man comes, this yellow butterfly appears in the house’.” In the novel, the appearance of one of the characters is always accompanied by yellow butterflies.

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García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, died in 2014 aged 87. In his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale (2003), he wrote about the importance of memory to a writer. What mattered to him was not the reliability of a memory – as he acknowledged, his was often fallible – but the fact that he remembered things in his own way.

For García Márquez the past was retrievable, albeit doctored to serve the demands of fiction. But in his final years he worried that his memory was not what it once was and that his ability to write was in jeopardy. “Memory,” he said, “is at once my source material and my tool. Without it, there is nothing.”

In his latter years he worked on the story that has now been published as Until August. García Márquez was doubtful about whether it would ever be worthy of publication, and told his children so. However they, as they say in their introduction, saw things differently: “another possibility occurred to us: that the fading faculties that kept him from finishing the book also kept him from realizing how good it was”. Its publishers describe it as “lost” but that is misleading; rather, it was laid aside, either to turn to vinegar or, as here, to mature into a good wine.

It is always a risk to publish a book which its author was unable finally to revisit and revise. With Until August, however, one feels that García Márquez’s reputation is in no way sullied by its resurrection. What it may lack in terms of the inventiveness and polish of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera it makes up for in narrative verve. For as a teller of stories, Garcìa Márquez has few equals.

As is often the case with him a woman is the principal character. Ana Magdalena Bach is married to a musician – the only man with whom she has slept – and has a son, a cellist, championed by Rostropovich, and a teenage daughter who can learn any instrument by ear and who wants to be a nun.

Ana is in her mid-forties. She has an “autumnal motherly face”, skin the colour and texture of molasses, and reads classic literature. Among the books she consumes over the years we follow her are Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear. Which indicates – none too subtly – that she is not a frivolous person. They are also, needless to say, the kind of books the author himself liked to read.

Ana makes a rough four-hour crossing in “a canoe with an outboard motor” from an unnamed place to an unnamed island in the Caribbean. There, she checks into a hotel where she meets a man, “a Hispanic gringo”, nursing a bottle of brandy.

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Like her he is in his forties. They have a one-night stand during which we learn that he is “not as well-endowed as her husband”. Be that as it may, theirs is a mutually satisfying encounter in the course of which “she reached again for the nesting creature and found it deflated but alive”.

If García Márquez intended this to be amusing, he succeeded. Come morning, the man is gone, leaving Ana with a twenty dollar bill for her trouble and a feeling of “unbearable humiliation”.

For the next few years Ana returns to the island and on each occasion she finds a man with whom to have sex. Quite why she is doing this is a mystery, at least initially. But we do know that the ostensible reason for her annual trips is to lay flowers – gladioli – at her mother’s grave on 16th August. Why her mother is buried on this remote island does not become apparent until the end of what is no longer than a longish short story.

What is clear from the outset is that even in his twilight years García Márquez retained his ability to grab readers by the scruff of the neck and hold them there. Until August may lack the chutzpah of One Hundred Years of Solitude but it has a beguiling simplicity and simmering sensuality.

At its tale is a story of love, which is García Márquez’s prevailing concern. Until August may not further enhance his gilded reputation but neither will it do it any harm. Thank goodness his heirs decided that it was better to have it published than leave it to languish in a distant archive.