Oprah Picks Cholera for Book Club

By Aída Bardales -- Críticas, 10/15/2007

Earlier this month, media mogul Oprah Winfrey picked Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera; Vintage) as her 59th Book Club selection. During her talk show, Winfrey said it was “a book I’ve wanted to choose for a long, long time…. You just want to eat it!” Originally published in 1985 by Colombia’s Oveja Negra Editores, the classic tale of unrequited love is set in 19th Century Colombia and centers on a “fifty year, nine months, and four days” love triangle involving Florentino Ariza, Fermina Daza, and her husband, Juvenal Urbino. A film version, starring Spain’s Javier Bardem, is scheduled to premiere in November 16.

Vintage, the U.S. publisher of the English-language (first published in 1988) and original Spanish-language editions, announced soon after that it would print 750,000 copies of the work in translation and that the original version would also carry the Oprah Book Club seal on the cover. Confirming simultaneous marketing efforts for both versions, Milena Alberti Pérez, editorial director of Vintage Español, told Críticas, “we have bestseller placement in all the sales outlets and in [The New York Times] the Spanish-language edition was cross referenced.”

This year, García Márquez celebrates his 80 birthday, the 25th anniversary of his having received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the 40th anniversary of the publication of his masterpiece, Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), which was an Oprah Book Club selection in 2004.