' UNTIL AUGUST ' : BOOK REVEIW

FICTION : GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ'S posthumously published, unfinished novella, despite its shortcomings, carries his deep understanding of mankind's experiences and misadventures.

UNTIL AUGUST is the story of a woman in a man's world. The late Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a lifelong denouncer of patriarchy.

He blamed machismo and oppression of women as a great cultural flaw of Latin America. This is the world from which Ana Magdalena Bach, a 46-year-old married woman with children, strives to escape the double standards, with her disconcerting passions and transgressive sexuality.

Although the novels of Nobel Prize-winning Garcia Marquez are full of developed female characters -from the various mothers, grandmothers, sisters and daughters in his most famous classic '' ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE '' to his more lucid Love in the Time of Cholera - Until August is perhaps his only novel with an uncontested female protagonist.

The other unique feature of his posthumous novel is that it is set in modern times. '' Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.''

This most famous opening line of Marquez's most famous novel clearly implies a bygone era where ice was a marvel. Similarly, most of his other novels are of a pre-modern country. Not so in Until August, which is set in Garcia Marquez's own contemporary times.

A third unique feature of Until August is that it is incomplete and, according to its author not worth publishing.

'' This book doesn't work,'' he told his two sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo Garcia, 

'' It must be destroyed.''

In an act of betrayal, however, his two sons decided to '' put his readers '' pleasures ahead of all other considerations.'' The 120-page novel was finally published in March 2024, after the unfinished manuscript had been lying in Austin, Texas, for over 10 years.

As the novel opens, Ana Magdalena is seen at her mother's grave, which she has been visiting every year on August 16, laying gladioli flowers down in a cemetery that sits above a small, unnamed island off the coast of Colombia that her mother had asked to be buried in.

Ana is happily married and has a good family but, this year, she impulsively decides to seduce a man and take him up to her room.

This sensuous encounter with a silver-haired Spanish gringo changes everything.

The World Students Society thanks Javed Amir, a retired diplomat living in Washington DC.