Gabriel García Márquez, See you in August , translated from Spanish by Sanela Sofić.
WRITTEN BY: Zejneba Hajdarevic
See you in August - insufficient to be called a novella, much less a finished novel - functions as an episodic sketch of the main character's love experiences, which nevertheless speak of the disastrous price of stolen years, but also of mirageous desires before the jaws of various beasts of everyday life.
In an act of betrayal by Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, and for the pleasure of his readers , as the sons of the famous Colombian Nobel Prize winner note in the preface, Gabriel García Márquez's last literary work , See You in August, was published posthumously, despite his wish to have the manuscript destroyed. This is a confirmation of the famous catchphrase that of course manuscripts do not burn , so ten years after the writer's death (and on the conscience of his sons), a microscopic story of fragile and (harmless) relationships is presented before us. Its content - not enough to be called a novella, much less a finished novel - functions as an episodic sketch of the main character's love experiences, which nevertheless speak of the devastating cost of the stolen years, but also of mirageous desires before the jaws of various everyday beasts. There is also a slight hint about loneliness, the breakdown of life perspectives, about the body and the desire for touch; then something more significant, about that ultimate bittersweet scourge - nostalgia (of the Odyssean kind) - suffering caused by ignorance and an unsatisfied desire to return to someone or something. Then again, all this is reflected as a creative "maybe". For such a narrative world, it is not the very thing of which it is made that is ugly, but the manner of its expression.
Anna Magdalena Bach, on the threshold of her fifties, is adorned with everything that an accomplished woman of her age can be adorned with: mature beauty, charm, a successful career and an even more successful marriage with a man, an orchestra conductor whom she loved and who loved her . But every August 16, repeating her one-day ritual trip to the Caribbean islands to lay a bouquet of fresh gladioli on her mother's grave, she embarks on a series of naughty and fulfilling sexual escapades. Eros and thanatos are, however, doubly mediated here. She bursts with femininity and vitality, while at the same time wallowing in guilt and vulnerability. Anna Magdalena's infidelity is not a psychologically complex gratification of appetite: a relapse of some original sin, nor is it a question of moral relativism. On the contrary, if the readers share a similar worldview, there is something of that, characteristic of everyone, individual relaxation before the challenges of the unknown: the seductive and inevitably tragic crossing of measure and harmony. In the morning when, in the absence of her lover, she finds just a trace (a twenty-dollar bill in a romance novel), then the curse comes to life and the horrified awareness of having exceeded the measure takes its martyrdom form of punishment, which again, as time passes, becomes a painless memory and, at the same time, more than important proof of what it means to be alive.
In these last records of Márquez, you have to work your way slowly to such a grain of beauty hinted at. Just before the attention of the mind, clouded by the words and their clumsy intersection, gives way, that picture of the world is revealed in which the main character, by running away from the assigned role, was drunkenly prolonging her own life.