Front Row, Radio 4
You can’t reach out from beyond the grave and stop your family publishing something you didn’t want published.
“This book doesn’t work, it must be destroyed,” were Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s words about his novel Until August, which has just been published even though he didn’t want it to see the light of the day.
Maybe Marquez didn’t want it but his sons did.
Front Row featured an interview with the famous South American writer’s son Gonzalo, who was upfront about the decision to go ahead, against his father’s wishes.
Presenter Tom Sutcliffe is assured, knowledgeable and grounded; he cuts to the chase.
Money is the elephant in the room in situations like these.
“We just want the readers to make up their own minds... it’s not One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s the work of someone in his old age,” said Gonzalo.
By the time he was writing it, the author’s Alzheimer’s disease was advanced.
Still, the family thought the book was finished and didn’t need a lot of editing, said Gonzalo, who was upfront too.
“We did think about it (publishing) for about three seconds,” he said. “Was it a betrayal to my parents, to my father’s… and yes, we decided it was a betrayal but that’s what children are for.”
A lively debate followed involving Max Liu and Blake Morrison on the ethics of going against a great writer’s dying wishes and publishing after their death.
Kafka wanted his works destroyed and his friend Max Brod didn’t do that... what a loss would that have been, came the argument.
“This book doesn’t work, it must be destroyed,” were Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s words about his novel Until August, which has just been published even though he didn’t want it to see the light of the day.
In this novel – or novella – it was the sex writing that also proved a talking point.
After a night of passion, the couple lay in “a soup of sweat” and when she turned to her lover for a second bout, “she reached again for the resting creature and found it deflated but alive”.
“I’m afraid I did laugh out loud at that point and I would like that line to be edited out,” said Sutcliffe.
We were cringe-laughing along with him.
The talk turned to Byron’s diaries that were fed to the flames and Larkin’s diaries shredded by his secretary. What have we all missed? Were we lucky?
Yes, and maybe this novel is flawed, but people are curious to read it because of the writer’s reputation.
Just gird your loins for that sex scene.