Shortly before he died nine years ago, the highly acclaimed Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez requested that his final novel, Until August, should not be published. However, last week his sons announced that the work would be released in March next year. The rights and wrongs of going against their father’s wishes are complicated by the fact that at the time of writing this final novel, Márquez was living with dementia.
Perhaps Márquez, who won the Nobel prize in literature in 1982, compared the work with his earlier novels and found it lacking because of his dementia. Critics weren’t too kind about the last book he did publish while he was alive and living with dementia, but they might have been unaware of his struggles. Perhaps that’s why Márquez wanted this one to remain unpublished. Dementia strips away so much from you, that maybe the thought of another failure at his craft of writing was too much to bear.
But to look at it through the eyes of someone with dementia, like myself, diagnosed nine years ago, maybe the book will provide something more. A clue to how his talent had or had not changed with dementia in tow. I certainly couldn’t have written my three books without the help of my partner in writing, Anna Wharton. Yet Márquez was an already accomplished author doing what he did best, writing novels.
Surely dementia hadn’t removed all his abilities. We all have talents and we don’t suddenly lose those talents overnight when diagnosed. I totally understand why Márquez continued to write. I type every day for fear of dementia snatching away that creative skill, which I see as my escape from dementia. Maybe Márquez thought the same? I gave myself a two-week break from writing over Christmas one year and when next I opened my iPad, it was an alien contraption. The old adage of “use it or lose it” is never more true than for those of us living with dementia.
Márquez’s sons have stated that: “Until August was the result of our father’s last effort to continue creating against all odds.” Maybe they consider that working on this novel helped slow the effects of their father’s dementia. After all, it wasn’t dementia that finally killed him, but pneumonia. Personally, I think they should be proud that their father continued writing despite his condition.
I would have loved to be able to compare his writings pre-dementia with this posthumous novel. Would dementia have changed his style – highly unlikely from a man who’d written many books, but maybe there were small changes; touching, tiny details, of relishing “the moment”, as I try to do. But sadly, that comparison is beyond me as I can’t even read my own books, never mind someone else’s; dementia has taken away the ability to retain information from one page to the next a long time ago.
Perhaps that’s what makes Until August even more intriguing, because somehow, he may have retained that ability.
• Wendy Mitchell is the author of One Last Thing: How to Live with the End in Mind
