Product Description

When a witch doctor appears on the Marquis de Casalduero's doorstep prophesizing a plague of rabies in their Colombian seaport, he dismisses her claims - until he hears that his young daughter, Sierva Maria, was one of four people bitten by a rabid dog, and the only one to survive. Sierva Maria appears completely unscathed - but as rumours of the plague spread, the Marquis and his wife wonder at her continuing good health. In a town consumed by superstition, it's not long before they, and everyone else, put her survival down to a demonic possession and begin to see her supernatural powers as the cause of the town's woes. Only the young priest charged with exorcising the evil spirit recognizes the girl's sanity, but can he convince the town that it's not her that needs healing?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #120442 in Books
• Published on: 1996-06-27
• Original language: Spanish
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Review
The book is almost a novella, but as always with Garcia Marquez's work it can - must - be read again and again, each reading disclosing new layers of meaning and enjoyment. When Garcia Marquez was a young reporter, he watched the demolition of the Convent of Santa Clara in Cartagena, in Columbia. As the high altar was shattered, 'a stream of living hair the intense colour of copper spilled out of the crypt' - the hair of a young girl buried there two centuries before. From this moment grew the central idea of Of Love and Other Demons; the story of that girl, Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles, imprisoned in the convent because she is believed to be possessed. The Bishop orders a priest, Cayetano Delaura, to exorcise her; instead, he falls in love with her. This is the story of that doomed love. It is a perfectly realized story, as inevitable and as steeped in poetry as a Shakespearean tragedy; Garcia Marquez's vision is as strange, vivid and memorable as ever, and every scene in the book lives in the memory, described with the vibrancy of a medieval illumination, from the opening paragraph, when a rabid dog runs through the market of Getsemani, to the closing one when Sierva Maria lies 'dead of love in her bed, her eyes radiant and her skin like that of a new-born baby. Strands of hair gushed like bubbles as they grew back on her shaved head'. Review by DEREK PARKER (Kirkus UK)

About the Author
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927- ) was born in Aracataca, Colombia. His most recent book, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, is his first new novel to be published in a decade and is available as a Penguin Paperback. He is the author of several novels, works of non-fiction and collections of short stories, including Leaf Storm (1955); One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967); The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975); Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) and The General in His Labyrinth (1989). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.