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Gabriel García Márquez: Sons publish novel that late author wanted destroyed
- magp 3y agoAn interesting take on the topic from our philosopher friends at https://hiphination.org/complete-season-one-episodes/episode-one-the-wishes-of-the-dead/ https://hiphination.org/complete-season-one-episodes/episode...
- wryoak 3y agoClassic: authors trying to take their texts to the grave. We also wouldn’t have The Master and Margarita if Bulgakov’s wife had respected his death bed wish to have it burnt.
- shrubble 3y agoManuscripts don't burn, however...
- neogodless 3y agoThere's a free article on NPR about this: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1236246186/gabriel-garcia-marquez-novel-until-august-published https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1236246186/gabriel-garcia-mar... There's also a related story about the author at the time of his death (April 17, 2014): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606131 (160 comments) Gabriel García Márquez, Literary Pioneer, Dies at 87 (nytimes.com)
- nindalf 3y agoI’m conflicted about this. On one hand, I adore his books and I’m sure this would be great, even if he didn’t think so himself. Reviews I’ve read suggest it’s good, though not as good as his best work. But I feel like I’m being disloyal if I read something he explicitly wanted no one to read. On balance I think I’ll skip it. I got plenty of other books to read anyway.
- shadowgovt 3y agoThis is an ancient conflict. IIUC, Kafka wanted his work destroyed. I think about half his published material is posthumous because his friends couldn't bring themselves to comply with his wishes and, in fact, believed it was important for the world to read it.
- fifilura 3y agoI was just about to post! I believe the world would not have been a better place without these books. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Brod#Publication_of_Kafka's_work https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Brod#Publication_of_Kafk...
- moralestapia 3y ago>believed it was important for the world to read it Sure, if you also ignore the obvious economic reasons attached to it.
- jhgb 3y agoEconomy is not a zero sum game. There's no reason why both sides can't benefit from it.
- fifilura 3y agoOr maybe his incentives were not purely economical? Why should I have to assume that?
- moralestapia 3y agoBecause there's a thing called "the public domain" and they didn't opt for that.
- fifilura 3y agoI don't know what the "public domain" discourse was in the 1920s, if was considered even an option. But there are other things you relinquish by giving it to public domain, not only money.
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- MisterBastahrd 3y agoLife belongs to the living. If he really wanted his last novel destroyed, he should have done it himself while he was still able to do so.
- fsckboy 3y ago"Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes." - Goethe
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- Narretz 3y ago> Of course it's not a trashy romance novel, it is an amazing work of art Quote by the editor. Highlights a problem to me. Since Marquez is so famous, they feel the need to put this novel on a pedestal, even though it might just be "okay". Which of course is okay in itself. I also think the sons contradict themselves when they say that their father lost the intellectual power to judge if the book should be published, yet didn't he also write it during this time? So I understand it like Marquez was aware of his mental problems and that's why he decided not to publish.
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- joe_the_user 3y agoIt's not unusual for authors to express a desire for their unpublished works to be destroyed. Kafka wanted all his unpublished works to be destroyed - consider these are most of his known works now, we're quite lucky his executor, Max Brod, defied his wishes.
- csdvrx 3y ago> It's not unusual for authors to express a desire for their unpublished works to be destroyed. Kafka wanted all his unpublished works to be destroyed - consider these are most of his known works now, we're quite lucky his executor, Max Brod, defied his wishes. Are we lucky, or was Kafka unlucky? I find the lack of respect about authors' wishes very shocking.
- drunkpotato 3y agoWhy? They’re dead. Not trying to be flippant, I honestly don’t get why the deceased’s desires should be elevated over the living’s. It’s a moral choice I don’t agree with and don’t entirely understand.
- hosh 3y agoThis is less about the deceased's desires over that of the living and more about creative control. Any creator will want to polish their work. It's already difficult enough to articulate and express the source of inspiration, and even polished, the material expression almost never matches its source.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago…but destroying it deprives a future creative from putting in the polishing touches. Shoulders of giants and all.
- vidarh 3y agoI've published two novels, and I have tons of notes for all kinds of things, and frankly while there is lots I have written that I don't want to publish until/unless I rework it, and some things I don't want to publish at all, I couldn't give a shit what gets published after I'm dead other than to the extent it'd harm or embarrass anyone I care about. I don't think I have anything that'd harm anyone, but I do have things that might embarrass some. Like love poems written in my youth that has sentimental value for me, but might be embarrassing to my present or then girlfriend, for example. Frankly, all I'd ask of a literary executor would be that they 1) humor my requests while I'm alive, 2) respect the wishes of my family. Other than that, whether they actually follow through on my wishes? Put it this way, if I find myself in an afterlife, as an atheist, I doubt whether my executor stuck my wishes will be high on my list of things to care about. And without an afterlife it's not as if I'd be able to care. Or know,
- COGlory 3y agoWhat if he did want it published, and this is just marketing?
- FourHand451 3y agoTerry Pratchett had a plan for things he was working on at the time of his death: > Pratchett told Neil Gaiman that anything that he had been working on at the time of his death should be destroyed by a steamroller. On 25 August 2017, his assistant Rob Wilkins fulfilled this wish by crushing Pratchett's hard drive under a steamroller at the Great Dorset Steam Fair. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett#Unfinished_texts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett#Unfinished_tex...
- msie 3y agoThat's too bad. Kinda selfish in a way.
- reedf1 3y agoI felt a spark of rage when I read this. It's even more selfish to demand content from an artist.
- aqfamnzc 3y agoHow so?
- ghaff 3y agoIt's what's more important? Doing fan service for fans who will revere your grocery list because it brings them joy? Or leaving behind a body of work you're really proud of and is widely respected? I make it black and white but it's not obvious to me you always want to publish things just because some people will devour them.
- jmull 3y ago> It's what's more important? Doing fan service for fans who will revere your grocery list because it brings them joy? Or leaving behind a body of work you're really proud of and is widely respected? Since you'll be dead and utterly unaffected either way, I'd go with pleasing the fans. Also, it's really a freebie for your legacy if it's understood that it was written under the influence of dementia and published posthumously. On the other hand, if I thought it would be depressing or unpleasant to fans more than please them, I would want it destroyed. But that's what I'd do. Terry Pratchett had every right to make his own decision on this. Even with dementia, that's 100% his call. (Of course, his assistant should make sure he was fairly consistent on this point, when most lucid.)
- tombert 3y agoAfter Dr. Seuss died, they started publishing his unpublished stuff. "Daisy-Head Mayzie" is the one that comes to mind. At a certain point in my life I used to think that was bad, but to be honest I feel like it's naive to think we have any control of our legacy after we die. I think it's best to publish these things, but treat them as more archival biographical than anything else, like a journal. I honestly don't think "Daisy-Head Mayzie" is bad, or even the worst thing with Dr. Seuss' name on it, and it's an interesting look into his opinions on becoming famous. I'm glad it was published, even if he wouldn't be.
- petre 3y agoThey probably wanted to publish the work but couldn't do it, so they left it up to chance. If one really wants to destroy their work, they throw it into the fire like James Joyce did with Stephen Hero, or what became Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Fortunately his wife Nora was quick enough to save it, helped by his sister. I tried to read it but only made it to chapter three.
- dang 3y agoSee also (but no comments there, as we merged the thread hither): Gabriel García Márquez Wanted to Destroy His Last Novel. It's Being Published - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39630173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39630173
- wly_cdgr 3y agoA disgrace. I will never buy or even read these. None of us should.
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- lagadu 3y agoPretty sure the dead can't get offended by what we do with what they left behind.
- 7thaccount 3y agoThis reminds me of the amazing Kentucky Route Zero game, which references a bunch of magical realism authors like Marquez.
- dhosek 3y agoThere’s the famous story about the scholars who broke into Beethoven’s tomb hoping to rescue some lost pieces that were buried with him. When they opened it, they found him furiously erasing the manuscripts. “What are you doing?” the horrified scholars asked. “Leave me alone,” Beethoven replied. “I’m decomposing.”
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- grugagag 3y agoThat was a good one.
- nottorp 3y agoCareful there. Could be another masterpiece... or it could be one of the 3480 new "Dune" novels allegedly written from Frank Herbert's notes. Quality stuff, that.
- jl6 3y agoPersonally I think it is right to respect the reasonable wishes of the recently deceased, but there’s a time limit on everything. Eventually, the deceased pass into history and become fair game. There’s no sharp boundary, but 10 years isn’t that long.
- bena 3y agoWe are often our own harshest critics. I think you should have someone you trust to gauge the quality of your work and let them make the call. Because like people here have pointed out, some authors wanted their works destroyed when they died, but for some that is the work we most know them by.
- renewiltord 3y ago> "We did think about it for about three seconds - was it a betrayal to my parents, to my father's [wishes]? > "And we decided, yes, it was a betrayal. But that's what children are for." Haha, fucking brilliant. I love this. Certainly the children of the man. I think this is a good thing they have done. There is no harm done to the man, since he no longer exists. Truly philosophical descendants of Diogenes of Sinope.
- soperj 3y agoI think Gabriel Garcia Marquez would have been fully on board with that thinking.
- moralestapia 3y agoYou mean that Diogenes of Sinope? Garnering all this attention and going through all this trouble? For money? Over stuff that wasn't even his but just "given to him"? No way!
- lagt_t 3y ago[flagged]
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- mseepgood 3y agoHow is this ethical?
- selimthegrim 3y agoI can't remember if it was Warhol or Zappa who strictly enjoined (with no legal force) his heirs/descendants/family from putting his image/words on coffee mugs and it happened anyway.
- cvalka 3y agoGood call.
- kouru225 3y agoAs someone who deals with art and artists on the regular, the thing most people don’t realize is how much our perception of them and their art is built on top of an illusion. It’s the artist’s job to create an illusion of a cohesive narrative. Sometimes that gets into artists’ heads and they’re overly afraid of breaking down that narrative, but sometimes that fear is absolutely justified. It’s a hard judgment call that unfortunately gets even more confused by the prospect of making straight bank
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- Springtime 3y agoMichelangelo burned as many of his sketches as possible days before his death in a similar attempt, some biographers believe, to control his posthumous reputation.
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- tomcam 3y agoUgh I'm sorry to do this to you but I'd like to learn more about that world if you're up to a paid consult. Contact info in my profile.
- crossroadsguy 3y agoReminds me of Go Set a Watchman.
- whittyytyty 3y ago[flagged]
- freedomben 3y agoI find myself utterly torn on stuff like this. I don't know about in this particular case but I think about cases like Ottilie Assing who had her entire (meticulously preserved) collection of letters destroyed on her death. There were countless historical treasures in there that were entirely lost to history. Correspondence with important contemporary people, and entire stories that will just never be known. Frederick Douglass is probably the most significant figure involved, but she corresponded with countless leaders in the abolition, feminism, and religious freedom movements, including leaders of states. The humanity behind the romantics was so obscured because of their careful crafting of their images, and a loss like that is impossible to even fathom. I'm sure she was in her opinion protecting people, but from this futuristic vantage point where we recognize the humanity in people, the human connection and loss from such willful destruction is painful to contemplate, and everybody involved is long dead. If a friend of mine asked me to destroy their unpublished work I would, but I would probably hate myself for doing it.
- vasco 3y agoLets say you could take someone's remains and boot them up in a laptop and peruse all their memories from when they were living. Accept for a minute this piece of science fiction, but let's say the technology was there, it would just be about respecting or not the dead person's privacy. The ethics to me sound similar, if wishes are clearly known or can be inferred by a standard of reasonableness (like in the case of memories), I think the person's privacy trumps society's curiosity.
- freedomben 3y agoThanks this is a great thought experiment! It does seem like a great reductio ad absurdum since the collection of papers/correspondence is merely a subset of the life's worth of memories. I find myself being repulsed at this intrusion/invasion of privacy, so I am (as I suspected) very torn and inconsistent on this one.
- vonjuice 3y agoI think more than curiosity, in a case like this, it's the matter of the artistic merit. I don't think the sons would have published this if they didn't feel it was worth doing so. Good Black Mirror premise tho.
- carrozo 3y agoReally shocking to see so many comments here arguing we have a right to see/read/hear private, unpublished work that a deceased artist left clear instructions to destroy in the event of their death. Do we get to look at your personal journals, browser history and hidden photo gallery once you kick the bucket? Or is it only artists who must relinquish their privacy and last wishes to satisfy the morbid curiosity of the general public?
- jeltz 3y agoYes, you do. If my siblings put all my stuff online I wouldn't care. When I am dead I am dead and it is their choice.
- timwaagh 3y agoLook he is no more so he won't be offended. It is his family that is doing this. Unless some other similarly close family member objects I don't see a big issue.
- SergeAx 3y agoIt is not private materials; it is just unfinished work. Lots of unfinished works by different artists found places in museums, where we can better understand their art, their methods and learn from them.
- strken 3y agoHonestly, yeah, as far as I'm concerned you've got a right to anything I leave behind. Maybe with some caveats like "...once everyone who knew me is dead" or "...excluding the obvious things like passwords and private keys giving access to other peoples' stuff". Otherwise the world descends into a necrocracy of random rules established by dead people a century ago and upheld in perpetuity.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoHe's dead. Now the thing that matters is, what other people think and want. Especially his executors. Almost by definition. He wanted it destroyed? He could have done it himself. Don't put weird things in your will. Do them before you die. At least then, you know they got done. And get to see them get done! All these people who leave things to their granddaughter or whatever, jewelry, the family dingus, just give it now! Enjoy their thanks, see them enjoy it.
- ak_111 3y agoThe irony here is that - as Marquez highlighted in many occasions - he was deeply influenced by Kafka (probably his single biggest literary influence). And Kafka as mentioned in this thread is probably the most well-known example of an author who wanted most of his work destroyed (he literally wanted it burned) but was betrayed by his executor of will. So I wonder, given his legendary playful personality and the fact that he must have been aware of the Kafka example, if Marquez knew how this will end up, and made it so the unpublished novel will turn out to be filled with allusions of literary ghosts hunting down those who betray them and how those who are reading the book are deranged bastards for poking the corpse of the writer.
- forinti 3y agoThat's interesting. I find Kafka so arid and GM so colourful I would never have guessed this fact.
- ak_111 3y agoYou could say their style almost stereotypically and to a comical level reflected their environment, race, personality and occupation which was as polar opposite from each other as you can be: Central European introverted Jewish actuary vs Latin American extroverted leftest journalist writing satirical columns. But their imagination certainly seemed to come from the same place as many who read them noticed without even being aware that one influenced the other.
- vonjuice 3y agoI don't think it should be surprising, I'd say good artists often enjoy a wide variety of styles, and it's not unusual for their favorite artists to be their complete opposite, perhaps that's precisely why they're their favorites. Iirc Paul Thomas Anderson has said he's a fan of Michael Bay.
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- lukan 3y ago"but was betrayed by his executor of will." That was no betrayal. Because Brod told Kafka before, that he will refuse this last wish to burn everything, and instead publish it all, should he be tasked with it. Kafka still ordered him with his last wish - knowing the person said he will refuse. That's rather a kafkaesk joke to me. If Kafka really would have wanted to burn it all his works - he could have a) do it himself b) ask someone who would not outright refuse
- gareve 3y agoThese days we don't know if that's true or if is just a marketing ploy to publish some unfinished book.
- Zals 3y ago[flagged]
- drewcoo 3y agoCraven, talentless children of one of the world's greatest (deceased) authors publish part of his work against his will. Wonder why . . . Disgusting.
- Zals 3y agoFor a publicly known figure, a committee needs to be assembled, filled with one loved direct nuclear family member, mostly to object to everything and the rest of be still mostly distant cousins, aunts/unckes, etc.. And a to piss most of you off, i would demand a religious entity that of the Christian faith and that person's entire presence is to protect the deceased honor, even if the dead had none in life. Why it should be this convoluted? Because i want those unpublished whatever too, precisely because thats the subject matter that made the dead one famous. But since we're robbing his grave, I'd want to make myself feel good by appearing to care about "honor". Which you'd be crapping on in the next sentence.
- raylad 3y agoMy father was an artist, also suffering from some dementia, and towards the end he went through huge stacks of his work and put much of it aside and told me to throw those away. But I noticed that a number of the ones he wanted me to throw away were works he had signed. So when he made them, he had been proud of them. My thinking was similar to Marquez's sons: why should I trust his opinion now rather than his opinion then? So I put them aside and labeled them as "rejected" rather than throwing them away. They will always be listed as "rejected" but I still think they were worth keeping.
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- syngrog66 3y agowhy is this on Hacker News?
- eyeundersand 3y agoFrom the Guidelines on what to submit: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
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- coldtea 3y agoIf he really wanted it destroyed, he'd have destroyed it. Kafka wanted the same, if his will wasn't violated, we wouldn't know Kafka's novels, just a few stories here and there (who didn't make a spash anyway, so they'd vanish without works like the Trial and the Tower to drive interest to them). Though one could argue that how Kafka's wish was treated was itself Kafkaesque. We didn't liberate the works from his death wishes, we stomped on Kafka once more. The real moral of the story is: delete your browser history.
- ragazzina 3y ago>If he really wanted it destroyed, he'd have destroyed it. Maybe he wanted to keep working on it and if it had reached a standard that he found acceptable, he would have published it, and if he had died before then, he didn't want it published"
- bgun 3y agoIf you don’t accept the risk of your children running amok with your personal, artistic, cultural, or spiritual legacy, don’t have children. I don’t absolve his children of making the decision they did, but I also don’t possess their lived experience and would hesitate to make generalizations about all generational privacy concerns on the basis of a single person of interest, however famous.
- zubairq 3y ago100 years of solitude was a book that left such an imprint on me. I read it nearly 25 years ago, and it was many years after reading the book that I finally started to understand it, but glad that I read it.. a true masterpiece!