Gabriel Garcia Marquez died a decade ago, but a short novel by the author who popularized the Latin American "magical realism" genre, has only now been published - against his own wishes. 

Mexico City

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a prominent author known for popularizing the Latin American "magical realism" genre, passed away a decade ago. Recently, a short novel by Marquez was published, despite it going against the wishes he had expressed before his death. The publication of this work has stirred controversy, as it directly contradicts the author's previous directives concerning his unpublished manuscripts.



Why author Garcia Marquez's son 'betrayed' his father

The latest novel from Nobel-winning author Gabriel García Márquez has just been published, a decade after he died, and apparently against his wishes. García Márquez's work helped make Latin American magical realism popular, where a storyteller drops fantastical elements into a realistic setting. And before his death in 2014, at the age of 87, he said his novel Until August was useless and should be destroyed. However, his sons and literary agents reviewed a number of the manuscripts and decided they had a literary value that may not have been perceived by the author in the last few years of his life, which were tainted by memory loss. Rodrigo García is the author's son. RODRIGO GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, Author, Translator Translator There would be much easier and much less controversial ways to make money, but this is what it is, and these are the risks you take when you have the responsibility of such a literary collection. And the truth is, we like the book. We think it is worth reading. So although it hasn't been easy, we have no regrets. Until August was released in Spanish on García Márquez's birthday, March the 6th, and on March the 12th in English, according to publisher Penguin Random House. The book tells the story of Ana Magdalena Bach, who every August takes a ferry to an island to visit her mother's grave, and there takes a new lover every night. Were we betraying him? Yes, we did betray him, but we also betrayed a person who had lost his faculties and had lost the ability to judge the book. His sons say that the book still carries their father's recognizably beautiful prose and his deep understanding of human nature. Gabriel Márquez is best known for 100 Years of Solitude, a dreamlike epic that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. For more UN videos visit www.un.org

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