The unpublished work of Gabriel García Márquez will see the light of day in 2024. This was announced this Friday by the Random House Literature label, which has specified that the novel In August we will see each other will be published in all Spanish-speaking countries, except Mexico, coinciding with the tenth anniversary of his death.
Readers have been waiting for this work for a long time, of which there was evidence, but it was not known whether or not it would end up reaching bookstores. It remained, like the rest of his personal archive, at the Harry Ramson Center, in Austin (United States), and now his family has decided that it should come out, twenty years after his last published work, Memory of my sad whores. , in 2004.
It is "without a doubt the most important editorial event of the coming year," they say from the label. Before he died, the Colombian author was finishing this novel, a work with which he intended to close the cycle that began in 1985 with Love in the Times of Cholera, followed by Del amor y otros demonios (1994) and Memory of my whores. sad (2004).
La Vanguardia already published the first chapter in 2014. As explained to the press at the time, it is the story of a woman from high society who goes to visit a seaside resort on the Colombian coast every August, a story initially conceived by Gabo for short stories. Each chapter of that novel recounted one of the visits of the woman, who, according to the story published in 1999 in The New Yorker, was called Ana Magdalena Bach, was 52 years old, was happily married and every year visits her mother's grave in an island in the Caribbean.
For 28 years and every August 16, the woman has complied with a punctual visit to her mother's grave, on which she places a bouquet of gladioli and takes the opportunity to tell her family news. She and she each time she has stayed in the same room in the same hotel. Until one night on one of those August 16th, she meets a man at the hotel bar.
García Márquez's personal archive was sold by his family to the University of Texas (USA), where it is part of the Ransom Center's collection, documents that include original manuscripts, predominantly in Spanish, of ten of his books, along with more than 2,000 pieces of correspondence and drafts of his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
They also house more than 40 photographic albums documenting various aspects of his life over nearly nine decades, the Smith Corona typewriters and computers on which he wrote some of the most beloved works of the twentieth century, albums of newspaper clippings from Latin America and around the world that meticulously document his career as a writer.
