FEATURED BOOKS
While researching this story, I came across several references to books that have been especially meaningful to Señor Gutiérrez. The following are showcased in the illustrations: • The first book Gutiérrez discovered on his garbage route was Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, a novel about an upper-class woman who feels trapped by her everyday life. The book is set in nineteenth-century Russia, a time and place quite different from modern Colombia. • One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Nobel Prize–winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, is the multigenerational story of the Buendía family and their lives in the isolated village of Macondo. It is an example of magical realism, in which events mirror everyday life, with the exception of some fantastical (and often unexplained) elements. • The book young José reads at the end is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella The Little Prince. First published in 1943, it is considered a children’s classic, featuring a young explorer who visits Earth after living alone on a tiny planet no bigger than a house. Also a complex allegory, the story mirrors the author’s experiences leading up to World War II and explores larger questions about love and the meaning of life.
SELECTED ONLINE SOURCES
La Fuerza de las Palabras: lafuerzadelaspalabras.org/site/ “Bogota’s Bibliophile Trash Collector Who Rescues Books”: aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/05 /bogota-bibliophile-trash-collector-rescues-books-170522084707682.html “Colombia’s ‘Lord of the Books’ Saves Tomes from the Trash”: csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2018/0625 /Colombia-s-lord-of-the-books-saves-tomes-from-the-trash “From Garbage to the Bookshelf”: facebook.com/watch/?v=910112349130273 “‘Trashy’ Books: Garbage Collector Rescues Reading Material for Colombian Children”: usnews.com/news /world/articles/2015/08/26/colombian-garbage-collector-rescues-books-for-children
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