An unpublished novel by Gabriel García Márquez will be released on the market in 2024 to mark the tenth anniversary of the death of the Colombian novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, according to what the publishing house “Random House” announced.
The publisher indicated in a statement that the new book by the author of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera” will be available next year in the markets of various Spanish-speaking countries except Mexico, and considered that the publication of the book “will certainly constitute the most important literary event for the year 2024.”
And the narration titled “We Meet in August” represents the fruit of “the last efforts” of the writer “to continue writing despite the difficulties,” according to the statement quoted by his sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barca.
Writer and journalist Gabriel García Márquez, born on March 6, 1927 in the northern Colombian city of Aracataca, has a large number of short stories and novels.
The Serpentes Institute indicates that Marquez is the most translated Spanish novelist whose work has been translated since the beginning of the 21st century, ahead of Chilean Isabel Allende, Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, and Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, who also won the Nobel Prize.
Journalist writer
The journalistic stories written by Marquez were a legend in the newsrooms and among the senior editors who worked with him and praised his journalistic talent, thus serving as a model of inspiration for every young Colombian journalist who aspires to highlight his ability to transform the news event into something human that goes beyond journalism.
Despite the international fame he gained from his literary works and his Nobel Prize, García Márquez remained committed to practicing journalism because of his impatience with what he considered “the slow habits of Latin American journalists”, his concern about the continent’s turbulent history, and his desire to influence political debate.
Marquez presented a style that strangely and uniquely blends truth and fiction, and is considered one of the flags of the magical realism school, that literary genre in which he seems influenced by his journalistic background, his “real profession,” as he used to say.
The technique of this school of fiction mixes fantasy and magical elements on the one hand, and human characters on the other hand, in order to express realistic events in a way that astonishes the reader, confuses his senses, and makes him unable to distinguish between the real and the imaginary.
In his life, Marquis refused to describe him as a genius with a huge imagination, considering him merely a literary craftsman, and said, “Writing is almost as difficult as making a table, it needs a little magic and a lot of hard work.”
Evidence that Marquez remained a journalist came when he published his book “Kidnapping News” in 1996. The book is a thrilling account of how Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar kidnapped a group of well-known personalities, in an attempt to blackmail the government into stopping his extradition to the United States.
Despite his reputation as an international novelist, Márquez explained that what prompted him to write non-fiction about Colombia’s powerful crime syndicates in a way that differed greatly from his fantasy novels was his anger at the inability of Colombian journalists to search for a shadow story he believed worth telling.
