The betrayal of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in sketchy posthumous novel

Fiction

Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Cartagena, Colombia. Photo: Getty

Luke Warde

The publication of ­Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ­“rediscovered” novel, Until August, has provoked much controversy. Before his death in 2014, the Colombian Nobel Laureate, already suffering with dementia, insisted the text not see the light of day. “This book doesn’t work” and “must be destroyed”, he told his sons Gonzalo Garcia and ­Rodrigo in no uncertain terms.

But they have defied their ­father’s wishes and published it anyway, judging the text to be “much better than [they] remembered”, as they put it in their afterword apologia.