Of Love and Other Demons [Paperback]

OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS is part fantasy, part reality, with some magical realism included, but it is totally Gabriel Garcia Marquez and it is one of my favorites.

Unlike Garcia Marquez's masterpiece, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE and the funny and poignant LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, OFLOVE AND OTHER DEMONS contains no real wit and is wholly dark and gloomy and filled with terror. The recipient of that terror is the book's protagonist, Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles, an aristocratic young girl in an unnamed Latin American port city.

Sierva Maria is the only child of Don Ygnacio de Alfaro y Duenas and Bernarda Cabrera. Both mother and father are terrible parents. Don Ygnacio spends his time cowering from life in a hammock in his garden, while his wife, who is addicted to cacao and fermented honey, strolls through the house naked, mourning the end of her wild affair with a slave named Judas Iscariote. Both Don Ygnacio and Bernarda are wholly unlikable, though Don Ygnacio does manage to redeem himself somewhat in the end. Because of her parents lack of availability, Sierva Maria spends her time with the black slaves that work on her father's plantation and, as a result, she is much more African in her outlook than she is Spanish.

One could envision Sierva Maria living out her days happily with the slaves, forgotten by both mother and father. The incident that drives the plot of this book, and the one that alters the course of Sierva Maria's life, however, is a bite on the ankle by a dog suspected of having rabies. Even though it's quite clear that the dog was not rabid, Don Ygnacio, on the advice of the local bishop, takes his daughter to a convent and decides that she much be exorcised of the demons that have, of course, come to possess her with the bite of the dog.

Once Don Ygnacio makes the decision to exorcise the demons from his daughter's life, a priest named Cayetano Delaura enters the picture and promptly falls in love with Sierva Maria, primarily because of her lush, coppery hair. Father Delaura greatly opposes Sierva Maria's familiarity with the African slaves, but it is a Jewish doctor, Abrenuncio de Sa Pereira Cao who opposes Father Delaura. Abrenuncio knows Sierva Maria hasn't been infected with rabies, but he has his hands full attempting to convince Don Ygnacio and the abbess of the convent in which Sierva Maria has become a prisoner.

The prose in this dark book is gorgeous, as beautiful as that in ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE even if it does lack the wit. It doesn't really matter because wit isn't needed in this story. The prose is lush, gorgeous, magical, limpid, luminous and poetic. It provides a perfect counterpoint to the harrowing story it tells.

OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS many not be Gabriel Garcia Marquez's masterpiece, but it is certainly one of the best books ever written. I would definitely recommend this book to everyone and it is certainly a good place to begin if you're a first time reader of Garcia Marquez.

I couldn't put this down, read it in one afternoon on a bench by the bay. Marquez has created a world entirely of his own, this isn't Columbia in the 17th Century, nor is it some dreamscape stalked by nightmarish figures. This is a tale of robust power, dealing with lust, love, sickness, transgression, madness, faith, frailty, flesh and loss. In this world presented to us, each of them swirl together until you can't distinguish them from each other. The lives of the people in the pages: the rotting, resigned father; the impassioned atheist doctor; the brilliant, doomed and tormented priest; the deluded sex-crazed mother; the drooping slaves; the vindictive nuns... and at the heart- the crimson-haired little girl as a primal force of nature- incomprehensible, vibrant, fierce... A resounding laugh in the faces of the Stoics who intoned- "Live According to Nature." The writing bursts with energy, with poetry, with blood and bile and pale venom- you can almost smell the pages sweat. Few books evoke so much with so little (it's very short, after all). This is a fine novel, an abundant and wretched dream that will possess you for as long as you immerse yourself in it.

No one can fuse logic and magic like marquez. In "Of love and other demons", a beautifully lush and colourful book, marquez seeks to examine the blured relationship between love and logic.

It is about a young girl who is bitten by a rabid dog on her birthday. Subsequently, after failed attempts to cure her, she is suspected of infact being possessed. As a measure, she is sent to a nearby convent, and Priest Delaura (relatively young but dynamic) is sent to take charge of this matter. However, he falls deeply in love with her, and comes to believe that she is infact not at all possessed. He is a voice of reason, in an otherwise ignorant and paranoid world.

This may sound dry on one level, but that is what makes marquez such a phenomenon. The prose is bursting with life. You read as if mesmerised by all the dreams, motivations and love. It is a passionate love story, but also "tragic" in a sense. MArquez portrays love as a demon of sorts, in that it can take over a seemingly controlled individual (in the case of Delaura) much like demonic possession. Love is undeniably and incomparably fulfilling, yet heart breaking all at once. Read this short parable, and be enchanted by its utter beauty.