Toward the end of his life, as his blindness progressed, the shy librarian who answered to the name Jorge Luis Borges began to feel alienated from his alter ego, the celebrated writer. “I know of Borges from the mail,” he wrote in a prose poem published in 1960. “I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature.”

I’ve found myself thinking of Borges ever since I learned about the posthumous publication of Until August, by Gabriel García Márquez, who died in 2014. The themes of García Márquez’s new novel will be familiar to readers of his Love in the Time of Cholera: Every August, Ana Magdalena Bach, a married woman on the far side of middle age, travels to an island off the coast of an unnamed Latin American nation to lay flowers on the grave of her mother. Her pilgrimage, however, is also motivated by a less dutiful reason: to get away from her husband long enough to take on a new lover.

Though Until August, like everything García Márquez wrote, is dense with detail and social observation, it isn’t his best work by any stretch. I suspect that if we removed the author’s name from the cover, a scholar might conclude it was the work of an inferior imitator. Garcia Márquez apparently felt the same way: Before his death, at age 87, he told his family in no uncertain terms that the book “doesn’t work and ought to be destroyed.” Nevertheless, his children and estate decided to disregard his wishes. Like Borges in his later years, they seem to have concluded that literature doesn’t belong to its author “but rather to the language and to tradition.” And despite the novel’s weaknesses, they should be praised for having done so.

If García Márquez’s main themes throughout his long and prolific career were the power of love and the love of power, his signature formal device was found in a technique of repetition: Events recur, names reappear, plots bend into circles, endings become beginnings. This cyclical notion of time, inherited from Borges, had metaphysical and political implications. Just as the course of our individual lives inevitably leads us back to our origins, the history of Latin America is not a tale of progress but an epic of stagnation in which hope clashes with fatalism. For García Márquez, repetition was first of all a narrative method—and perhaps a theory of literature.

Nowhere is this clearer than in a famous passage from One Hundred Years of Solitude. After the “plague of insomnia” strikes Macondo, the town’s inhabitants begin to come up with increasingly mind-numbing pastimes, hoping that boredom will eventually lull them to sleep. The last of these unamusing amusements is “an endless game” where a character identified only as “the narrator”—an obvious figuration of the literary writer—asks the others if “they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon.” When they answer “yes,” the narrator responds that “he had not asked them to say yes, but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon”—which leads to an infinite loop.

Such cyclical repetitions also sit at the center of García Márquez’s posthumous novel. Until August is not so much episodic as iterative. Though Ana Magdalena gets involved with a different man each time she returns to the island, the novel has exactly one plot point: The particulars change, but the actions remain the same. This is not to say that the book lacks a narrative arc. The protagonist changes dramatically over the course of the novel; with every successive erotic encounter, Ana Magdalena—and, by extension, the reader—discovers new facets of herself. The men are all mirrors, but each one has quirks and idiosyncrasies that reflect different aspects of the protagonist. Time bends in a circle, but every turn of the wheel has unique elements.

The first of Ana Magdalena’s lovers, for example, is a “Hispanic gringo” whom she notices staring at her at the hotel bar, where the pianist plays incongruous bolero arrangements of Debussy. The gringo is dressed in white linen and sits alone at a table with a bottle of brandy and a half-empty glass. Ana Magdalena, too, has been drinking; to her bewilderment, she catches herself holding the man’s gaze. She was still a virgin when she dropped out of the faculty of arts and letters to get married, and she has never slept with anyone other than her husband. Little by little, though, she leads herself astray. The sex is transformative, inaugural, almost like a second first time. But this experience of liberation turns bitter the following morning, when she wakes to find the man gone. And not only that—he has also left money on the bedside table. Ana Magdalena feels the implication like a slap in the face: The man thought she was working that night.

And yet, despite the insult, the encounter with the businessman elicits a profound change in Ana Magdalena. Her husband, a teacher of music at the local conservatory, is a good man and a good partner; decades after their honeymoon, they still have fun in bed. But now, for the first time in her life, she realizes that her desires exceed the strictures of the role she has played since she was young. When she returns to the island the following August, she sets out to find another man to take to bed. This one is younger, with sleek and affected manners. He asks her to dance and grasps her waist and pulls her close without permission, until there’s nothing between them save their clothes. The sex is rougher, forceful, almost violent—and yet pleasurable.

The novel repeats these sexual encounters over and over again. Yet each night of passion leads to new discoveries: In the mirror of these men, Ana Magdalena begins to learn more about herself and even about humanity in general. But the repetitions also lead her to darker insights that echo the one elicited by the money her first lover left on the bedside table. At one point, years after the affair with the sleek young man, she recognizes her lover’s face in a police composite sketch: He’s wanted for the murder of two widows.

But even while Until August’s iterative structure is effective, and its feminist gestures—how else to call them?—are at once surprising and welcome, the fact remains that, as Michael Greenberg noted in The New York Times, García Márquez’s final work sometimes reads less like high literature than like a Harlequin romance. The prose is often hackneyed, and clichés abound: The omniscient narrator describes more than one lover as “exquisite.” The philosophical depth of One Hundred Years of Solitude—so often overlooked by Anglophone readers who mistook García Márquez’s novel of ideas for entertaining tropicalia—is almost entirely absent from Until August.