The rediscovered novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Sitting alone beside the languorous blue waters of the lagoon, Ana Magdalena Bach contemplates the men at the hotel bar. She has been happily married for twenty-seven years and has no reason to escape the life she has made with her husband and children. And yet, every August, she travels by ferry here to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover. Across sultry Caribbean evenings full of salsa and boleros, lotharios and conmen, Ana journeys further each year into the hinterland of her desire and the fear hidden in her heart.
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.
