"Until August" by Gabriel García Márquez: A Review

 

Gabriel García Márquez’s Until August (En agosto nos vemos), published more than a decade after his death, is a slender, lovely final story from one of the greatest literary voices of the 20th century. Completed in its fifth draft before 2004 but left unfinished due to the onset of dementia, the novella was ultimately published in 2024 with the blessing of Márquez’s sons, who recognized that despite its incompletion, the work pulsed with the unmistakable rhythm and sensuality of their father’s voice. They were right.

Until August is the story of Ana Magdalena Bach, a married woman who travels alone each year to the island where her mother is buried, always on the same day in August. What begins as a yearly pilgrimage for remembrance soon becomes something more complicated—and more human. On these trips, she seeks out fleeting, anonymous sexual encounters with strangers, as if trying to match death’s finality with life’s immediacy.

There’s a breezy elegance to the prose, rendered here in a fluid English translation that captures Márquez’s tone of amused omniscience. The story unfolds like one of his most memorable sentences: long, winding, sensual, and deceptively simple. Though lacking the baroque sprawl of One Hundred Years of Solitude or the epic weight of Love in the Time of Cholera, this novella feels unmistakably Márquezian in its use of repetition, earthy realism, and wry eroticism. It’s a tale of aging and desire, of memory and reinvention, and perhaps above all, of the disobedient persistence of the body.

Reading Until August, I had the feeling (how could I really know) that Márquez understood women’s inner lives—how desire in his stories is never reduced to biology or scandal but portrayed instead as an assertion of freedom, of life against decay. Ana’s secret annual ritual is not framed as transgression but as a quiet rebellion against the slow death of domesticity and predictability. Her story unfolds in tones that are light, melancholic, and often laugh-out-loud funny. At one moment, Ana wonders if her husband suspects anything; at another, she is misplacing her panties on a hotel balcony with almost childlike innocence. Márquez allows her to be contradictory, self-deceiving, and utterly alive.

The circumstances of the book’s publication inevitably invite questions. Did Márquez want this released? Would he have changed the structure, added more? His sons say he lost the ability to revise due to advancing dementia, and it’s clear this is not a polished final novel. But what’s also clear is that the material hums with vitality. 

SPOILER

In the final paragraph of the novel I was convinced it was, except for polishing, a complete work.  Ana comes home from her last night on the island (no love the last year) with a sack of bones that is her mother's earthly remains. Her return to home and her husband with mom's bones in a sack echoes the floating bodies in the river beside the ship as the lover's escape at the end of Love in the Time of Cholera. 

Until August is a sharp meditation on aging, love, and autonomy. It may not be his greatest work, but it is very good, offering one final glimpse of that unmistakable magic that only García Márquez could conjure. 

Women in Their Element: Selected Women’s Contributions to the Periodic System by Annette Lykknes and Brigitte Van Tiggelen (Editors)

 

The periodic table is often presented as a clean grid of discovery—elements appearing one by one through the insight of famous chemists. Yet the real history of chemical discovery is far more complex, collaborative, and human. Women in Their Element: Selected Women’s Contributions to the Periodic System brings that complexity vividly to life. Edited by Annette Lykknes and Brigitte Van Tiggelen, the book is both a scholarly reference and an engaging collection of stories about the women who helped build modern chemistry—sometimes celebrated, often overlooked.

Rather than presenting a simple chronological list of discoveries, the editors organize the book around themes that shaped the development of the periodic system. This structure works especially well. It allows readers to see how discoveries emerged not only from individual insight but also from evolving scientific fields such as radioactivity, spectroscopy, analytical chemistry, and instrument development. By grouping the chapters around these themes, the book shows how scientific progress unfolds through networks of researchers, laboratories, and technologies.

The most famous figure in the book is, of course, Marie Curie, whose work on polonium and radium stands among the most important discoveries in modern science. Yet one of the book’s great strengths is that it moves well beyond familiar names. Readers encounter a wide range of women who contributed to identifying, isolating, measuring, or characterizing elements. Some were collaborators whose work was overshadowed by male colleagues. Others were pioneers in laboratory techniques or instrumentation that made later discoveries possible.

In many cases these women worked under conditions that limited their formal recognition. Scientific institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often barred women from academic positions, societies, and prizes. As a result, their contributions frequently appeared under the names of male supervisors or collaborators. Women in Their Element does not simply seek to “correct” the historical record by adding forgotten names; it demonstrates how scientific discovery itself is collective. Element discovery often depended on teams, assistants, and technical specialists whose work rarely appeared in headlines.

One of the pleasures of the book is its attention to the practical side of chemistry. The discovery of new elements was not only a matter of theoretical insight but also of laboratory skill and technological innovation. Instruments for detecting radioactivity, methods for separating rare earth elements, and improved analytical techniques all played decisive roles. By highlighting the women involved in developing these tools, the book expands the definition of what counts as scientific discovery.

Another delightful feature is the book’s extensive index of elements. Readers can trace where particular elements appear in the narrative, including historical placeholder names such as “eka-boron” or “eka-tantalum”—the temporary predictions used by Dmitri Mendeleev before those elements were actually discovered. The index even acknowledges the older philosophical “elements” of Aristotle—earth, air, fire, and water—reminding readers that the search for fundamental substances stretches back long before modern chemistry.

The time span of the book is impressive. The story begins in the early modern scientific world of the seventeenth century and continues through the twentieth century into the present. Along the way readers encounter changing laboratory practices, evolving theoretical frameworks, and the gradual expansion of opportunities for women in science. This long view makes clear that the history of the periodic system is not a closed chapter but an ongoing scientific project.

What makes Women in Their Element particularly satisfying is that it works on two levels. It serves as a reference work for historians of science and chemists interested in the development of their field. At the same time, it reads easily as a collection of narratives about persistence, ingenuity, and intellectual curiosity. The individual stories are engaging in their own right, yet together they form a broader picture of how the periodic table came to be.

For readers interested in chemistry, scientific history, or the hidden contributors to major discoveries, this book is both informative and enjoyable. It reminds us that the periodic table—one of the most iconic images in science—was not built by a handful of famous names alone. It emerged from the work of many minds, many laboratories, and many lives devoted to understanding the elements of the natural world.