I was really looking forward to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s posthumously released novel about a woman exploring her sexuality during her annual trips to a remote island. I had even featured it on my first quarterly reading list for 2024, which reminds me I have to start on the second quarterly reading list!
But back to our favorite author’s lasting legacy….
Tragically, the novel’s creation coincided with his memory loss and pained him heavily. He, as noted by his sons in the preface, had lamented, ” Memory is at once my source material and my tool. Without it, there’s nothing.”
Despite the erosion of his mental faculties, Gabo kept at it, but wasn’t happy with what he wrote, disappointed he instructed his sons to not publish the work as he didn’t think it work. But when his sons reread it many years later, they found it to be better than they remembered it and decided to put his reader’s pleasure ahead of all other considerations.
So, what’s the book about?
The protaganist is Ana Magdalena Bach, a woman in her late 40s who goes on the annual trip to bring her mother a bouquet of gladioli in her grave. But while there, she also finds herself yearning for a night of passion with different men. She has a happy marriage so the first time she sleeps with a man not her husband, she is visibly guilty. and believes she carries a mark symbolizing the affair. But later on, she ruminates about the occasions her husband strayed and so she continues, and she grows distant from her husband. Interestingly though, I could never make out if her husband had strayed or if she were merely projecting her insecurities and infidelities on to him.
The men treat her different, a reflection of their characters. The more men she sleeps with, the more she can’t tell them apart, and the guilt weighs heavily, till one day it explodes, forcing her to delve deeper into the inherited patterns of her life.
The novel retains the evocative style of Gabriel Garcia’s previous works, the idyllic island is symbolic of Ana’s desires, carefree and enticing. However, despite the beauty and expanse of her desires, her reality sometimes manages to rear its ugly head in the form of an old acquaintance or the abject poverty sprinkled haphazardly around the majestic hotels and resorts of the island. but doesn’t have the unhurriedness that comes with reading his works.
The turmoil inside Ana’s heart is not explored fully, she is devastated by her husband’s infedility in the beginning but seems accepting, But years later, why does she so suddenly give in to temptation during that visit. Subsequently, the end approaches as quickly as it began and you realize Gabo is not around to give it the ending it deserved.
The incomplete exploration of Ana’s inner turmoil and the abruptness of the narrative’s conclusion underscore the bittersweetness of reading something of a literary genius who won’t be talking to us through his stories again.
Just like Ana’s last tryst, I have to ask myself, was it worth it then?
Fingers in symphony 