Gabriel García Márquez: new extract hints at writer's 'last legacy'

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/23/gabriel-garcia-marquez-new-extract-legacy

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An extract from an unpublished manuscript by Gabriel García Márquez, in which the late Nobel laureate writes about a married woman having an affair on a tropical island, has been published in a Spanish newspaper.

La Vanguardia revealed a chapter from García Márquez's previously unpublished En agosto nos vemos (We'll See Each Other in August) earlier this week. The author died at home in Mexico City last Thursday at the age of 87, leaving behind him some of the most admired writing of the 20th century, from One Hundred Years of Solitude to Love in the Time of Cholera.

His death was marked with a memorial ceremony in Mexico City's Bellas Artes Palace on Monday, and figures from Barack Obama to Mario Vargas Llosa have paid their respects to an author whom Juan Manuel Santos, president of García Márquez's native Colombia, said would "live on in his books and writings. But more than anything he will live forever in the hopes of humanity."

The newly-unveiled extract starts as a 52-year-old woman, Ana Magdalena Bach, arrives at an island to visit the grave of her mother – a trip she has made every 20 years on the same day. Ana Magdalena, "a touch of bitter perfume behind each ear", goes on to sleep with a man at the hotel where she is staying.

The paper said that the extract came from an unpublished manuscript García Márquez had had in his drawer, and that he had not decided how it would end. His heirs, said the paper, would decide whether or not a book which it described as "the last legacy of a writer who changed the history of literature" would one day be published.

Novelists and critics contacted by the paper praised the extract, with one calling Ana Magdalena "another fascinating woman in the gallery of extraordinary women who populate the pages of the writing of García Márquez"; another saying that the author is like a "fine wine", and that "we perceive from the first sip – from the first line – a special flavour which attracts us and motivates us to keep reading".

The Associated Press found that the "erotic tone of the work is heightened by the island's tropical charm, with deftly drawn touches of the heat, the landscape, music, and local inhabitants".

García Márquez's biographer Gerald Martin revealed that the novel started out as a short story, telling the Associated Press: "This has come as a surprise to me. The last time I talked to Gabo about this story it was a standalone which he was going to include in a book with three similar but independent stories. Now they're talking about a series of episodes in which the woman turns up and has a different adventure each year. Obviously it makes sense and presumably Gabo really did play with it, presumably some years ago."

The last novel published by García Márquez was 2004's Memories of My Melancholy Whores.