Contains enough tenderness and beauty to recommend it to García Márquez’s many fans.” —Wall Street Journal

“Far more than a coda to a magnificent career . . . Anne McLean’s marvelous rendering of García Márquez’s posthumous Until August continues the tradition, immersing us in the dreamy richness of the author’s fictional worlds, amid characters pummeled by the demands of marriage, family and the dead . . . 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.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“García Márquez should be read because he is so influential a writer, one who remodelled his country’s perception of itself and reshaped its literature and that of the wider world . . . Yet more than this, unlike so many other ‘great writers,’ his books are enjoyable. Inventive storytelling comes with indelible characters and arresting images served up with episodes of sharp psychological acuity . . . Love—ecstatic, forbidden, transgressive and especially between older people—is one of his great subjects . . . Until August is 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.” —The Times (London)

Gabriel Garcia Márquez's last novel, although far from his best, deserves a better reading than it gets in this audio version. Catalina Sandino Moreno's English pronunciation is decidedly imperfect. A Spanish accent is not necessarily a problem with a Latin American novel, but an accent that interferes with our understanding of the text is not ideal. Moreno's phrasing also sometimes diminishes the clarity. The novel itself is quite interesting, despite the revelation that the author wanted it suppressed. It is the story of a woman's sexual and personal awakening over several years through a series of August visits to her mother's grave. While it lacks the depth of Garcia Márquez's best work, it still has his wonderful characters and prose. D.M.H. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

2024-03-23
García Márquez tries his hand at a steamy potboiler, for better or worse.

“This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.” So declared García Márquez, tinkering with this novella until his agent quietly approached an editor to help find an ending. The author had a point, but his sons and heirs, “in an act of betrayal,” as they write, put the book into print all the same. It’s not bad, but it’s far from Gabo at his best, a thinly sketched tale of an elegant woman with “pert breasts” who travels to a Caribbean island each August to visit her mother’s grave, staying always in the same hotel for a few days, then returning to her bourgeois married life in the city. She sets eyes on a younger man, and he on her, and soon the two are in flagrante: “She wanted to attack, but he revealed himself to be an exquisite lover who raised her unhurriedly to the boiling point.” All’s well until morning, when 46-year-old Ana Magdalena Bach discovers that he’s gone but has left money behind in payment for the good time. Money was not Ana’s intent, and it rankles, but all the same she returns year after year, having a quickie romance each time. The story has all the makings of a telenovela, but with a memorable ending that turns on a brilliantly macabre moment. Think of it as a more lyrical version of the 1978 rom-com Same Time Next Year, with perhaps a hint of “A Rose for Emily” and Belle de Jour in the mix: Most of the characters remain ciphers, but one senses that had García Márquez lived long enough to finish the book, he would have given them depth.

Of some interest to Gabo completists, but casual readers will want to take in his classics first.