Of Love And Other Demons - Softcover

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 067943853X ISBN 13: 9780679438533

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995

Synopsis

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera comes an extraordinary reading experience, the story of a doomed love affair between a twelve-year-old girl and a bookish priest, three times her age, who's been sent to oversee her exorcism.

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Reviews

The incantatory power of Garcia Marquez's prose is as potent as ever in this mesmerizing story inspired by an amazing event he witnessed almost 50 years ago, as a journalist observing the transfer of burial remains from the crypt of an old convent. When one tomb was opened, "a stream of living hair the intense color of copper spilled out." More than 22 meters in length, it was attached to the skull of a young girl whose body had been interred for 200 years. Remembering his grandmother's tales of a 12-year-old marquise who had died of rabies from a dog bite, Garcia Marquez has imagined the girl's life and the circumstances of her death. As usual, the atmosphere is colored by magical realism: dreams and portents, inexplicable, miraculous events. The offspring of a melancholy, ineffectual marquis and a mother yoked to "insatiable vices," Sierva Maria is raised by the family's West Indian slaves, who teach her the Yoruban language and magical practices. She is bitten by a rabid dog but shows no real symptoms; the local bishop, however, decides she is possessed by demons and orders her incarcerated in a convent where she will be exorcised by his gentle librarian, Father Delaura. But Delaura becomes possessed, too?by his love for this suffering child three decades his junior. Garcia Marquez describes the physical tortures inflicted on Sierva Maria as graphically as he does the rapturous?but chaste?love between the innocent, terrified girl and her confessor. A Jewish-Portuguese doctor says that "killing her would have been more Christian than burying her alive." This tragic tale is in essence an outcry against intolerance and bigotry and an indictment of a degraded Church that used its power with narrow-minded cruelty. In the end, the power of love transcends the earthly sphere.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In a Latin American port city during colonial times, a young girl named Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles?the only child of the ineffectual Marquis de Casalduero?is bitten by a rabid dog. Her father, who has shown no interest in the child, begins a crusade to save her life, eventually committing her to the Convent of Santa Clara when the bishop persuades him that his daughter is possessed by demons. In fact, Sierva Maria has shown no signs of being infected by rabies or by demons; she is simply being punished for being different. Having been raised by the family's slaves, she knows their languages and wears their Santeria necklaces; she is perceived by the effete European Americans around her as "not of this world." Only the priest who has reluctantly accepted the job as her exorcist believes she is neither sick nor possessed but terrified after being inexplicably "interred alive" among the superstitious nuns. Nobel Prize winner Garcia Marquez writes with his usual inventiveness, but over the years his prose style has crystallized and condensed. The result is a tale whose sharp social retort is made all the louder by the luminous, uncluttered telling. Highly recommended.
-?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In a South American seaport town, during the colonial era, when the division between the rich and the poor, the church and the state, and the saint and the demon were absolute, and people strutted and fretted about appropriately, 12-year-old Mari{¡}a de Todos los Angeles, daughter of the marquis de Casalduero and his wife, the flatulent Bernarda Cabrera, meets with the misfortune of being bitten by an ash gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead. When it is learned that the dog is rabid, Mari{¡}a's inevitable destruction begins. Through rumor, superstition, and the ghosts of her family's misbegotten past, it is assumed that Mari{¡}a will have rabies. When the problem comes to the attention of the ultimate authority, the bishop, high-born Mari{¡}a must be handed over to the Church for exorcism, for rabies in this time of love and demons means inevitable possession. Her only hope is Father Cayetano Delaura, her exorcist, a 36-year-old priest with a streak of white hair at his forehead, who falls in love with her before meeting her. Gabriel (One Hundred Years of Solitude) Ma{ }rquez's new fantastic novel is farcical, incredible, malicious, and sadistic. Magical unrealism. A timeless artist, an old master, unraveling the mysteries of life, again. Collette de Sac

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 067943853X
• ISBN 13: 9780679438533
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160