New Delhi: After years of speculation, publishers have confirmed that an unpublished book by renowned author and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez exists and could be in bookstores as early as next year, The Guardian reported Friday.
Penguin Random House confirmed that the book — titled En Agosto Nos Vemos, (We’ll See Each Other in August) — will be published in Spanish and on shelves around Latin America in 2024.
Rumours of an unpublished book have long been around, particularly after Márquez published a short story in 1999 about a woman, Anna Magdalena Bach, who has an affair while visiting her mother’s grave on a tropical Island. The story had been published in the Latin American magazine Cambio.
After Márquez died in 2014, it was believed that any unseen work of his would remain private, “as his family was thought to be uncomfortable publishing an unfinished work”, the Guardian report says.
But Friday, Márquez’s children said they wanted to share this piece of unpublished work with the world, after revisiting it nearly 10 years after his death.
We’ll See Each Other in August was the result of a last effort to continue creating against the wind and tide, his children, Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, said in a statement.
“Reading it once again almost 10 years after his death we discovered that the text had many and very enjoyable merits and nothing to prevent enjoying the most outstanding of Gabo’s work: his capacity for invention, the poetry of language, the captivating narrative, his understanding of the human being and his affection for his experiences and misadventures, especially in love, possibly the main theme of all his work,” the statement said.
According to the Guardian report, We’ll See Each Other in August will have around 150 pages, and contain five separate sections centered around Anna Magdalena. No English edition has been announced yet.
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Magical realism
The Nobel prize-winning author is considered one of the best of the 20th century, with a literary style that combines a realistic narrative with fantasy. The book ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, which tells the multi-generational story of a family whose patriarch founded a fictitious town, is considered one of the most influential works of Spanish literature.
“As time passes the importance of his work only grows. Like Dostoyevsky, Joyce and Cervantes, he had a unique style and perspective of seeing the world that has influenced the entire world,” Ariel Castillo, a professor at the Universidad del Atlántico in Barranquilla and leading expert in García Márquez’s work, told The Guardian.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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