There is certainly much to celebrate about the unexpected arrival of fresh work by a beloved writer, especially one as popular and influential as the writer of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.
The new book might offer glimpses of Gabo’s literary process, of what the master’s still-incubating work might be like.
By: Editorial
May 3, 2023 06:40 IST
The announcement that a new novel En Agosto Nos Vemos (We’ll See Each Other in August) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez will be published sometime next year has been greeted with jubilation by readers. For years, there were rumours of a manuscript and when the Nobel Prize winning Colombian writer died in 2014, it was believed his family was reluctant to publish the work that was unfinished. Nearly a decade on, they have changed their minds, believing that the work is “too precious” to be hidden away.
There is certainly much to celebrate about the unexpected arrival of fresh work by a beloved writer, especially one as popular and influential as the writer of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. An extraordinary storyteller, Marquez’s output was also remarkable for not having dimmed towards the end of his over five-decade-long career, with the last work published during his lifetime, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, being as strange and magical as any of the fiction he wrote at the height of his powers.
And yet, if there is disquiet over what some might see as cynical motives that poorly serve the writer himself, it is only natural. Who knows, after all, whether the book as it appears next year, will be in the final form that Marquez had intended for it. There have been examples in the past of literary estates, in a bid to continue profiting off a writer’s legacy, ignoring explicit instructions left by the latter: The case of Vladimir Nabokov’s notes for The Original of Laura, which he had directed be burned upon his death, being published as a “novel in fragments”, is a stark reminder of this not uncommon tendency. Perhaps such fears may be calmed by the hope that the new book might offer glimpses of Gabo’s literary process, of what the master’s still-incubating work might be like. Because that alone is an invaluable gift.
© The Indian Express (P) Ltd