Of Love And Other Demons - Softcover

Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Edith Grossman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140256369 ISBN 13: 9780140256369

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1996

Synopsis

Sierva Mari+a7a, the neglected child of a rich plantation family, is locked in a convent because she is believed to be possessed by demons, and there she falls in love with the priest sent to exorcise her. Reprint. 100,000 first printing.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera, a startling new novel -- the story of a doomed love affair between an unruly copper-haired girl and the bookish priest sent to oversee her exorcism.

Of Love and Other Demons is set in a South American seaport in the colonial era, a time of viceroys and bishops, enlightened men and Inquisitors, saints and lepers and pirates. Sierva Maria, only child of a decaying noble family, has been raised in the slaves' courtyard of her father's cobwebbed mansion while her mother succumbs to fermented honey and cacao on a faraway plantation. On her twelfth birthday the girl is bitten by a rabid dog, and even as the wound is healing she is made to endure therapies indistinguishable from tortures. Believed, finally, to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, the Bishop's protege, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train; who is already moved by this kicking, spitting, emaciated creature strapped to a stone bed. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels "something immense and irreparable" happening to him. It is love, "the most terrible demon of all." And it is not long before Sierra Maria joins him in his fevered misery.

Unsettling and indelible, Of Love and Other Demons haunts us with its evocation of an exotic world while it treats, majestically the most universal experiences known to woman and man.

Natasha Richardson's film credits include Nell, Widow's Peak, The Comfort of Strangers, and The Handmaid's Tale. She has appeared on stage in Anna Christie, High Society, Hamlet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, among others.

About the Author:

The oldest of twelve children, Gabriel García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928, in the small, banana-growing town of Aracataca, Colombia. Like Fermina and Florentino, the protagonists of his novel Love in the Time of Cholera, his mother went to high school and studied piano, and his father, too poor to complete his medical studies, became a telegrapher. He grew up in the great, gloomy house of his maternal grandparents, raised on his grandmother's tales of spirits and dead ancestors, and the civil war stories of his grandfather, a retired colonel.

With a new baby born every year, there was no money for school tuition, and at thirteen García Márquez applied for and received a scholarship to a boarding school outside Bogotá. His teachers recognized a natural storyteller, a gift García Márquez believes some people are born with. "Some people have a sense of timing, of organization of facts," he told the Los Angeles Times Magazine in 1990. "After that, it is a long way to becoming a writer. You have to learn to write well. It is a technical process, a process of elaboration and a capacity to elaborate experiences." Though he would have preferred to study philosophy and letters, García Márquez studied law at the National University in Bogotá, because the degree was more practical and the schedule permitted him an afternoon job. He nonetheless made his way through the great works of literature. Influenced by Marxist professors and the desperate economic straits of many Latin Americans, García Márquez became a radical socialist.

By the time the university closed down in 1948 because of political unrest, García Márquez had sold several stories to the local newspaper, El Espectador. He left for Cartagena on the Caribbean coast, where he knew he could find work on a newspaper. In 1954 he returned to Bogotá to work again for El Espectador, establishing himself as a well-known journalist. The next year García Márquez's first book, Leaf Storm, was published after a seven-year search for a publisher. When his account of the true story behind the shipwreck of a Colombian naval destroyer displeased Rojas Pinilla, the Colombian dictator, the newspaper prudently sent him abroad. Writing short stories all the while, García Márquez worked as a freelance journalist in Paris, London, and Caracas, and in 1959 opened the Bogotá office of the Prensa Latina, the newly-created official press agency of Castro's Cuba. In 1958 he married his childhood sweetheart, Mercedes Barcha. His first child, Rodrigo, was born in 1959 and his second, Gonsalvo, in 1962.

Q>A move to Mexico City was followed by four years in which García Márquez wrote no fiction at all. Then, one day in January 1965, as he was driving to Acapulco, the complete first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude suddenly came to him. He devoted eight to ten hours a day for eighteen months to his writing, emerging with a family saga that mirrors the history of Colombia. Published in 1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude became an international bestseller and is considered by many to be his masterpiece.

In 1982 García Márquez won the Nobel Prize for literature. His other works include four collections of short stories (No One Writes to the Colonel, Leaf Storm, Innocent Eréndira, and Strange Pilgrims), the novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and the novels The Autumn of the Patriarch, In Evil Hour, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The General in His Labyrinth.

García Márquez lives on the southern edge of Mexico City, and spends time in Bogotá, Cartagena, Barcelona, Cuernavaca, and Paris. He tries to write a page a day, declaring it "terribly hard work, more so all the time. Every letter I write weighs me down, you can't imagine how much" (Seven Voices). García Márquez credits the computer for rescuing him from his perfectionist tendencies; he once went through an entire ream of paper typing the final, letter-perfect manuscript of a fifteen-page short story.

His leftist beliefs and close friendship with Fidel Castro have not endeared García Márquez to the U.S. State Department, which allows him to visit the United States only by special dispensation. He remains a devoted advocate of human freedom and is insistent that Europe and the United States should allow Latin America to develop its own identity - and make its own mistakes - at its own pace and without intervention. "Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change?" he demands.

Q>Always looking for the story, García Márquez still writes occasional pieces of nonfiction. "When I write journalism, some people think I am writing literature. And I am very rigorous when I write journalism, very careful of reality," he told the Los Angeles Times Magazine. "But I have a way of selecting and seeing reality that is very literary.... I see things others don't." His interest lies in describing and storytelling rather than in making moral judgments or grand statements. "The writer is not here to make declarations," he once told his friend Mario Vargas Llosa, "but to tell about things."

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0140256369
• ISBN 13: 9780140256369
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160