“THE LOST NOVEL,” IT SAYS HERE, ON the cover of Until August, which is published ten years after the death of its author, the Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. And why shouldn’t they trumpet it? Márquez was by common consent one of the great novelists of the last century, influential on several generations of writers after him and the man who popularised the genre of magical realism. (We’ll forgive him the last.)
But if “lost novel” implies a missing masterpiece from the man’s pomp — they would imply that, wouldn’t they? — then let’s take a sense check. We’re a long way from Márquez’s touchstones One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985): indeed, a long way from full-length fiction at all, since…
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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2024