After the intense and polarized presidential campaign between the two political parties in the United States, the Democrats and the Republicans, we must turn the page on November 5.

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Today this column takes a breather and brings up an article originally published in an intellectual digital media outlet of politics and literature; Revista Abril, directed by the poet and writer of Nicaraguan origin, Francisco Larios, coinciding with the fact that next December, Netflix will launch a television series recreating Gabriel García Márquez's masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which has sold more than 50 million copies worldwide and has been translated into dozens of languages ​​around the planet.

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Recently, his children agreed to bring it to the screen and it has caused great excitement and expectation everywhere. For this reason, this article on the posthumous novel by the great Colombian master, Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1982, brings a refreshing vision for our readers while the country organizes itself for a peaceful transition of power on January 20, 2025 as has been the tradition since the time of George Washington.

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Below is the article:

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Why is it important to read See You In August?

The appearance of Nos vemos en agosto seems at first glance to be something far-fetched. Many claim that the author did not want it published, that his children are only looking for financial gain, etc.; but after reading the novel and understanding that it was Gabo's last conscious concern, we can only say that there are no words to describe what these 109 pages can provoke in any unprepared reader.

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The character proposes to us, in an apparently simple and clear language, the deepest and most complex contradictions of the so-called conjugal relationships and questions social prejudices, prudishness, and all the mediocre concepts socially accepted about female sexuality and especially the outdated concepts about fidelity and institutionalized monogamy, which break with the physical and emotional needs of Homo sapiens, who carries in his DNA the quantum mechanics of the Neanderthals.

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All this physical and psychological complexity is portrayed through a female character forced to confront her own sexuality, not at the beginning of puberty, nor in the middle of adolescence, but quite the opposite; when menopause arrives or approaches and everything she has experienced becomes questionable.

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Since Terence, the young slave freed by a Roman senator, who, despite having died so young – at the age of 25 – managed to write a remarkable series of plays that have marked Western literature and art, the great themes are definitely psychological intimacy and human sexuality. In some way, Anna Magdalena Bach's testimony in her attempt to find an alternative meaning to her sexuality referred to her readings prior to each state of mind for love; they give a historical context to this anguishing search where Roman jurisprudence and Freudian psychoanalysis fall short in trying to explain the existential anguish of a 46-year-old woman.

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It really strikes me that the character Ana Magdalena Bach is supposedly a reader who always has a classic in her hands in the moments before her emotional outbursts, but especially the first reference when she read half of the novel Dracula, the most intense, long-lasting and terrifying love story and the consequences that this reading had on the development and end of this novel or long story by Gabo, which leaves us as a legacy her concern for the sexuality of older women, especially in this era when some are naturally very well preserved, and others with many plastic surgeries.

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It is absurd to try to make literary criticism based on ideological, political or social prejudices, as well as to judge the subjective concerns of a writer when he is 22 years old and unknown, compared to his concerns when he is 80 and is a celebrated genius applauded by the world.

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His greatness lies in that human condition where the squeamishness of fame did not affect his simplicity and his deeply human concerns.

The world in which Leaf Storm and One Hundred Years of Solitude arose has nothing to do with the world in which Gabo conceived Recuerdo de mis putas tristes and even less so when he wrote the drafts of Nos vemos en agosto; originally a short story about which there is already a 30-minute film, which of course falls short of the entire work, although it is a good quality film, well acted and set.

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The fact that García Márquez has an interest in the sexuality of older ladies reminds me of Ovid's Erotic Poems, who lived between 43 BC and 18 AD and was one of the 3 greatest and most influential Roman poets, along with Virgil and Horace. Published between 8 BC and 8 AD as a series of works that have been collected as erotic poems and are entitled: The Loves, through which Ovid tries to persuade his elusive lover Corinna to sleep with him, through a sequence of elegies; Then, on the contrary, in The Art of Loving, he writes a wonderful and very experienced guide on how to achieve seduction with guaranteed results, which is complemented by Cures for Love, which is the sequence of the previous one and in which he explains the best way to end a relationship quickly.

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Finally, and very curiously, he writes Facial Treatments for Ladies, displaying his experience and knowledge in the art of cosmetics. From the overflowing passion of Dracula who lives 300 years, seeking revenge and to recover the love of his beloved Elizabeta, who committed suicide deceived by her enemies who made her believe that Dracula, then called Count Vlad Teppe, had died; to the concerns of physical and erotic love of Ovid, not to mention Galatea in Pygmalion, the history of literature is the history of the needs of the libido and its psychological corollaries in human beings.

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Despite the great advances in other fields of science and technology, in the 20th and 21st centuries feminist movements have to emerge, trying to claim women's rights in the face of sexist abuses that continue to cause great tragedies in the lives of a high percentage of women around the world. Therefore, García Márquez's concern is legitimate and moving, because Anna Magdalena Bach, in the midst of great readings, so close to classical music, a traditional and conservative wife; is forced to rethink her own sexuality, transcending the physical and real world for an unusual encounter with the beyond, while discovering the secrets of her own mother.

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There is a psychological condition that we know nothing about and that manifests itself in the acts that motivate her travels, visiting her mother's grave and at the same time giving free rein to her libido; the lack of explanations for this mysterious behavior leaves a taste of emotional unrest in the reader, like an unanswered questioning of the meaning of our own lives and the certainty of a macabre ending, like that of García Márquez himself, since the loss of her memory and her own death seem to be announced in the intimate, physical and mental contradictions of the tormented Anna Magdalena Bach, where the routine of the beautiful gladioli crashes with the horrible scene where the gravedigger unearths the remains of her mother "like a magician at a fair."