Garbriel García Márquez has been ill-served by his sons

I blame Kafka. When he died in 1924, the vast majority of his imaginative work remained unpublished, including three novels and a substantial number of remarkable short stories. He left instructions, however, for Max Brod, his literary executor, that all his unpublished work should be destroyed. Brod ignored this, and brought some classics of German literature into print after the author’s death. He sensibly concluded that if Kafka had been serious about wanting his work destroyed he wouldn’t have appointed Brod as literary executor in the first place.

The case was a good one; but it has undoubtedly had some ugly consequences. Manuscripts have surfaced that their authors either made clear they didn’t want published or had simply left behind, often resulting in little enhancement to their reputations. Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura made very little impact when it finally appeared. And, though Go Set a Watchman was published six months before Harper Lee died, it is hard to believe the book would have made it into print during her prime.

The question of the posthumous publication of drafted novels has been unhelpfully mixed up with the question of the publication of an author’s private papers. The destruction of letters and diaries – rather than a decades-long embargo to save the feelings of the living – has never turned out to be justified, whether it was John Murray burning Byron’s memoirs, or Robert Liddell destroying Elizabeth Taylor’s letters, Ted Hughes disposing of Sylvia Plath’s last volume of diaries or Philip Larkin’s secretary shredding his diaries. Conflating these situations with the suppression of a writer’s considered but rejected creative work is to bring two different problems together.

Gabriel García Márquez’s last great novel was Love in the Time of Cholera.