Last month, the Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez published his seventh novel, Until August. (The pedantic might suggest that at a slim 110 pages in suspiciously large type, it is more accurately described as a novella, but never mind.) There would be nothing especially remarkable about this, save that Márquez died almost exactly a decade ago, and Until August has been mired in controversy ever since his publisher Knopf Doubleday announced its posthumous publication. Márquez wrote the book while he was succumbing to dementia but retained enough self-awareness to say to his sons Rodrigo, himself an acclaimed writer and director, and Gonzalo, “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.” 

Initially, the brothers obeyed their father’s wishes. But as they examined the manuscript once again, they saw either an artistic or a commercial opportunity, or both, and hired an editor to take the 769 pages of drafts and notes that were lurking in Márquez’s archive in the Harry Ransom Center in Austin and rework it into some kind of coherent shape.