Now, a decade after his death, his last novel, titled “Until August,” will be published this month, with a global release in nearly 30 countries. The narrative centers on a woman named Ana Magdalena Bach, who travels to a Caribbean island every August to visit her mother’s grave. On these somber pilgrimages, briefly liberated from her husband and family, she finds a new lover each time.
The novel adds an unexpected coda to the life and work of García Márquez, a literary giant and Nobel laureate, and will likely stir questions about how literary estates and publishers should navigate posthumous releases that contradict a writer’s directives.
Until August is a sketch, as blurry and flawed as sketches generally are, but a sketch from a master is welcome. This slight book is like a faded souvenir, tatty but treasurable for its associations with the fabulous imaginary world that Márquez conjured up in his prime.
Stevens takes no word or phrase for granted. If she uses commonplace language, she typically does so in dialogue, or as a kind of punch line when her voice seems to give up, briefly, on its distinctive, careful consideration: “‘Now we’re cooking,’ the American said. He snapped his fingers. Good to go. On a roll.” The clipped, oddly pleasurable rhythm of Stevens’s prose denotes circumspection and a commitment to precision. Rife with surprising and resonant phrasing, the style of these stories thereby reveals Stevens’s apparent authorial project, the reason that fiction seems to matter to her—which isn’t to demonstrate a judgment of the world or even to imagine a better one, but simply to try to locate language that’s adequate to the feelings and confusions of a particular moment.
Oyeyemi seems gloriously unfazed by such reactions. Parasol Against the Axe opens with what appears to be a vignette from modern life: “I found myself a member of a WhatsApp group that seemed to have been set up as a safe space for sharing complaints about the capital city of Czechia.” But it quickly gets stranger. The narrator, who reads these complaints and writes an irate response, is Prague itself. In Oyeyemi’s world, the city is sentient — and mischievous. It is responsible for uniting lovers in surprise weddings (“Don’t worry about it. Just enjoy”) and tearing them apart; for harboring those on the run or for leading fugitives straight to the police.