La Paz is starting a book club on Latin-American and/or
Spanish culture, and we’re taking it to the polls!
After much mulling over, we have hereby compiled a list of
books (which have both English and Spanish translations)
that we think adequately represent a range of historical,
social & political aspects of said culture.
So take a look, read the summaries, go to the bookstore and
thumb through pages, and choose your TOP 3 books that
you would like to read as a part of our book club. Reply to
this post with your top 3 choices.
You Have Until WED, FEB. 3 to let your voice be heard!
La Paz Book Club:
FEBRUARY: 2nd & 4th Tuesdays
Beginning Tues, Feb. 9
La Paz Chattanooga Office
[MARCH and OCTOBER to be decided.]
Here they are, folks….
(1)Love in the Time of Cholera/El Amor en los tiempos del colera
by Gabriel García Márquez
Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza are brought together once more, in a meeting whose outcome is as fateful, as suspenseful, as any in literature. As the title suggests, Garcia Marquez has written a novel about love, love in all its guises: young love, married love, romantic love, carnal love, even love with the symptoms of cholera. More than that, he has written a work of art radiant with humanity that readers will savor and will remember for the rest of their lives. … So begins this story set in a country on the Caribbean coast of South America – a story that ranges from the late nineteenth century to the early decades of our own, tracing the lives of three people and their entwined fates. And yet, at first nothing seems inevitable, for this is a tale of unrequited love. Fifty years, nine months, and four days’ worth, to be exact. For that is how long Florentino Ariza has waited to declare, once again, his undying love to Fermina Daza…
(2)Dauther of Fortune/Hija de la Fortuna
by Isabel Allende
An orphan raised in Valparaíso, Chile, by a Victorian spinster and her rigid brother, young, vivacious Eliza Sommers follows her lover to California during the Gold Rush of 1849 – a danger-filled quest that will become a momentous journey of transformation. In this rough-and-tumble world of panhandlers and prostitutes, immigrants and aristocrats, Eliza will discover a new life of freedom, independence, and a love greater than any ever dreamed.
(3)La Casa de los Espíritus/The House of the Spirits
by Isabel Allende
Chilean writer Isabel Allende’s classic novel is both a richly symbolic family saga and the riveting story of an unnamed Latin American country’s turbulent history. In a triumph of magic realism, Allende constructs a spirit-ridden world and fills it with colorful and all-too-human inhabitants. The Trueba family’s passions, struggles, and secrets span three generations and a century of violent social change, culminating in a crisis that brings the proud and tyrannical patriarch and his beloved granddaughter to opposite sides of the barricades. Against a backdrop of revolution and counterrevolution, Allende brings to life a family whose private bonds of love and hatred are more complex and enduring than the political allegiances that set them at odds.
(4)Blindness/Ciego
By Jose Saramago
A city is hit by an epidemic of ‘white blindness’ which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides seven strangers – among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears – through the barren streets and the procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness is a powerful portrayal of man’s worst appetites and weaknesses – and man’s ultimately exhilarating spirit.
(5)When I was Puerto Rican/Cuando era Puertorriquena
by Esmeralda Santiago
Esmeralda Santiago’s story begins in rural Puerto Rico, where her childhood was full of both tenderness and domestic strife, tropical sounds and sights as well as poverty. Growing up, she learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs in the mango groves at night, the taste of the delectable sausage called morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby’s soul to heaven. As she enters school we see the clash, both hilarious and fierce, of Puerto Rican and Yankee culture. When her mother, Mami, a force of nature, takes off to New York with her seven, soon to be eleven children, Esmeralda, the oldest, must learn new rules, a new language, and eventually take on a new identity. In this first volume of her much-praised, bestselling trilogy, Santiago brilliantly recreates the idyllic landscape and tumultuous family life of her earliest years and her tremendous journey from the barrio to Brooklyn, from translating for her mother at the welfare office to high honors at Harvard.
(6)Like Water for Chocolate/Como Agua para Chocolate
by Laura Esquivel
In Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, the narrator chronicles the life of her great-aunt, Tita De la Garza, who lives in northern Mexico during the early 1900s. The novel’s twelve chapters, written one per month in diary installment form, relate details from over two decades of Tita’s life, beginning in 1910, when she is fifteen years old, and ending with her death at thirty-nine. Each chapter also includes a recipe that Tita prepares for her family during this period. After her mother refuses to allow her to marry the man she loves, Tita channels her frustrated desires into the creation of delicious meals that often have strange effects on her family.
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Whether acting as a translator, advocate, or counselor, Lydia Salva loves to help.
La Paz Chatt 