Oprah and Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Celebrity Revival
By Peter on Oct 27, 2007 in The World of Books
At first I was puzzled. Very puzzled. All of a sudden, out of the blue, a very old book jumped right up to the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list for trade fiction. The book is called “Love in the Time of Cholera”. This book was first published in Spanish in 1985. It was published in English in the US January 1, 1988. So it was about 20 years old when it jumped the charts. I pondered this.
Now, admittedly, this really is a great book. It is a book about a love that is so strong and so strange that it can be compared to cholera, and extremely well written as well. And, of course, the author - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - is a Nobel Prize winner in Literature, the man who also wrote the masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude“.
However, not even all of this - which really is quite a lot - can explain the sudden jump to the top spot after 20 years. Actually, in many ways it makes the jump much more difficult to explain: This is not an overlooked masterpiece by an obscure writer! This is a book that has been recognized as a masterpiece from the very day it was published, written by an extremely famous writer, and that was, in addition, launched with a huge marketing campaign. So it really is a book that should have, a long time ago actually, sold close to its market potential.
Many people immediately understood what was happening, and were not at all surprised..
 After all, it has happened before. But I, a slow Johnny Foreigner, did not understand. That is, until the solution to the riddle was explained to me, in very kind terms, by a close friend. It was simply that Oprah had chosen “Love in the Time of Cholera” as the book of the month in Oprah’s Book Club. That simple. Dead simple, actually. Or?
Well. It may be simple. But it also marvelous. For given the stature of the author, the quality of the book, all the marketing, and how long the book has been on the market, it is really quite an astonishing feat to generate the number of additional readers sufficient to produce the leap all the way to the top spot. It can more or less be taken for granted, I think, that a substantial number of those buying the book now, are people who don’t know about, usually don’t find, and probably don’t read this kind of book. All the more power to Oprah! ((Actually, Oprah Winfrey supports a lot of great initiatives. See her biography!))
And to me, and I think many, many others, it is great to see, even in the age of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, that some celebrities use their brand names and influence this way. The case of Oprah Winfrey also suggests that their brand names are not destroyed or diminished when used for advancing good causes. There is some comfort in that! Even in our day and age, Britney’s and Hilton’s ways are not the only ways to celebrity.
– Peter 
admin | Dec 22, 2007 | Reply
LOL Peter - Oprah has done it again. The old Follett book, Pillars of the Earth, now tops the US bestseller lists after having been chosen by Oprah.
Admin