Harsimran Kaur On July 09, 2024, In Book Review, Until August by Gabriel Garcia Marquez-Fiction
Rating: 4/5
Retiring to solace is often a palliative gesture against the pummeling agonies of life. Our wanderings come to a halt; the privileges to overcome the inadequacies spins us in the glory of a tender freedom never witnessed before, and the longing to be in our spirit settles to a new dawn of awakening. The solace thus becomes a garden of rosaries siphoning a smell of independence and presumed victory; but the same solace fails to see the helplessness beaming a trajectory of a conflict aflutter.
A visit to the cemetery…The cemetery on an island…Every August Ana Magdalena Bach pays homage with selfless gratitude. She carries solace every year to sit beside her mother’s grave offering a bouquet of gladioli. She imperceptibly rests them on the stone graving and leaves along with her solace. This very deepening solitude experienced away from her husband and children seems forbidden to her, but on the island Ana plays the anomaly erasing the awkward resistance to follies.
What she indulges every August apart from visiting the cemetery on the Island is a mystery; an impassioned mystery to her. And, often she thinks; is it possible to allow perfidy to sail in harmonious union with the truth of one’s existence? Can ‘I’ be someone else in order to fly from the grip of monotony, and then fall back again as ‘I’? She does that, yes! But squeamishly and often her acts are a revulsion to the present occupancy of domestic turbulence. One now thinks, what falls as the ‘ultimate truth’? If it is so good to be true, then why truth makes us helpless and deprived?
‘Until August’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a poignant expression of conflicts that survive piteously in our head, not awakened so that the ‘truth’ remains the hapless chap figuring out tricks to outstrip the falsehood dancing copiously in the ruins of melodramatic existence.
Ana leads a surprisingly perfect marriage, but down there like every string of rain finds its own ground to fall, the human liveliness too has its own patches of uncertainties. The downpour subsequently becomes silent leaving the clouds in their momentary imperfection; the human mind now finds solace by putting an end to the false creativity of disgruntled existence.
‘Until August’ is passionate, so much so that it impressionistically defines ‘love’ to be lived in the moment, and then remembered in the solitude of one’s refusal to accept it. Ana finds solace in this kind of love; finding lovers on each of her trips to the Island and then coming back empty handed; only the heart knows the torment, in fact to live with a memory that would be devoid of an origin.
Solace, what has it to offer?
Is solace, the kind Ana indulges in, is it an end to one’s suppressed emotions?
Freedom in solace; will it count as meditative or an incoherent dilemma of right and wrong?An island, a repetitive indulgence, an arousal of betrayal, finding one’s reflection under the grave, the momentary silence, the reverberating pours on the wet grass, the dilapidated gladioli and an old man on her mother’s grave—all come around as a past proffering the present to dilate its notoriety, as true freedom is letting the vulnerable go in thin air. You indulge in something to let go off something. However, nothing remains permanent but the truth of your own conscious.
TAKE AWAY
Fearless and enduring….