The first question one has upon the appearance of Gabriel García Márquez’s unfinished final novel, Until August, is whether the book will damage the author’s reputation—and fortunately, the answer is no ... This slight book, in a translation by Anne McLean, contains enough tenderness and beauty to recommend it to García Márquez’s many fans.
It would be hard to imagine a more unsatisfying goodbye from the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude ... A microscopic story, its contents hardly sufficient for it to be called a novella, much less a finished novel. Reading it may provoke unhealthy levels of frustration in those familiar with García Márquez’s most indelible creations.
There’s little insight about love to be found here amid the cringey sex scenes. Until August only occasionally gives glimpses of the master stylist ... This book really doesn’t work. His sons, it seems to me, made the wrong choice by ignoring his wishes.
García Márquez wrangles, too, with signature themes like the vulnerability of love and the buzzsaw of desire ... McLean's nuanced translation harkens back to the maestro's canonical novels while evoking, in a composition as tight as a Rembrandt portrait, the ache of human need.
Márquez’s mastery lies in his effortless interplay of imagery with emotions, sharply exposing how women’s sense of self-worth and sexuality are inextricably linked to their physical appearance, and the inevitability of aging ... In a style reminiscent of the postcolonial magical realism he defined, Márquez blends the banal with the beautiful, the enchanting with the humdrum, and the ironic with the prophetic.
No one, except for the publicists whose job it is to do so, is pretending that it is a masterpiece, lost and now regained ... So should it have been published? There are small errors of continuity. The structure is ungainly. More importantly, the prose is often dismayingly banal, its syntax imprecise.
An editorial afterword explains how the intimate, decidedly non-epic entertainment now before us – a brisk and frisky tale of extramarital sex doubling as a parable of parental inscrutability – was sewn together from García Márquez’s fifth draft and a document preserving offcuts from prior attempts. The smooth-reading result is the story of Ana Magdalena Bach.
The strengths of the novel lie in its understanding of passion and consequent guilt, sensitivities of conscience and what is best left unsaid ... The weakness is that this short novel sometimes seems underwritten. Themes, hinted at, are not developed ... Recognisably a García Márquez novel: inventively enjoyable and working to its surprising, pleasing ending. I read it straight through in one sitting, then got up the next day and did it again.
García Márquez’s sons...have decided to publish one final novel ... They should have resisted the temptation ... A recognizably Marquezian fable, stripped down to its basics. There are flashes of the author’s trademark charm: flowers, Caribbean gentlemen in linen suits, the scent of jasmine. Some of the old tricks and artifices are there, but all the subtlety is gone. The author’s once rich vocabulary is noticeably diminished.
García Márquez deftly registers the fluctuations of Ana Magdalena’s joys, reservations, and disappointments on this journey of self-discovery ... But although Until August is a remarkable book, it does not find its author at the peak of his abilities. It is praiseworthy but not the masterpiece it could have become if he had not been ailing and could have afforded his female alter ego the sort of treatment Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary received.
Though Until August, like everything García Márquez wrote, is dense with detail and social observation, it isn’t his best work by any stretch ... Even while Until August’s iterative structure is effective, and its feminist gestures—how else to call them?—are at once surprising and welcome, the fact remains that, as Michael Greenberg noted in The New York Times, García Márquez’s final work sometimes reads less like high literature than like a Harlequin romance. The prose is often hackneyed, and clichés abound ... Worst of all, the most visible repetitions in this last novel don’t seem to be deliberate choices. They are not metaphysical gestures, or political statements, or avant-garde narratological tricks, but evidence of a diminished vocabulary and a fading memory.
This novella, and its crisp translation by Anne McLean, avoids the disappointment of many other infamous posthumous releases from canonical authors ... This brief offering delivers graceful insight into the fickle human heart, serving as an absorbing—if quiet—epilogue to García Márquez’s towering oeuvre.
