Product Description

‘An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday of December…’ 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 María, was one of four people bitten by a rabid dog, and the only one to survive. Sierva María 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: #80496 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Review
Brilliantly moving. A tour de force (A.S. Byatt )

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.

Customer Reviews

A Novel that will have you Walking around in a Daze
I can never get used to Márquez. More than anyone else he is the master storyteller, the voice of a melancholy raconteur whose aphorisms reverberate in your head and deny you sleep; but you never begrudge him this. He manages to condense the substance of entire novels into a single understated sentence. His words are alive and wriggle under your skin.
Of Love and Other Demons is one of the twentieth century’s great works. A relation of the events surrounding Sierva María de Todos los Angeles, the daughter of a Marquis raised by black slaves, it captures the miasmatic superstition of the eighteenth-century perfectly, as rabies becomes confused with satanic possession, love with sinful temptation, and rationality with madness. Much like Romeo and Juliet, you quickly forget the age of the lovers at the centre of the novel – Sierva María is twelve; Cayetano Delaura thirty-six. Like Shakespeare’s play there is nothing immoral about this relationship, but it retains the same tragic potential: the virgin daughter of a Marquis possessed by demons in a mutual infatuation with the Bishop’s favourite, an erudite priest soon to take a position in the Vatican. It is doomed from the start, as almost everything in the story is – but much like he did in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Márquez proceeds to build excitement from inevitability, never needing to throw in a twist to keep the reader entranced, as lesser authors might. In particular he is exceptional at describing a world tinted through the vision of love, making everything richer, more sensuous. He is, for me, the greatest author alive today. Read him.

Marquez Scores Again - I Read It In 2 Hours!!
'Of Love...' is only the second of Marquez's book I have read (1st was '100 Years..') and I continue to be impressed and completely engrossed by his work. To illustrate how engrossed I was --THIS BOOK TOOK ME TWO HOURS TO READ. I felt like I was reading a fairytale at bedtime to my daughter, the magic and wonder of Sierva's existence stands second only to Marquez's style of prose. I fell in love with Marquez after '100 years...' and the second visit I've paid him, will only serve to keep me coming back for more. ASTONISHING!

A story one needs to read in this life.
As ever Marques gives his reader a wonderful story but this time it seems to me that it transends his other novels. This book is so perfectly crafted, so moving in its portrayal of the main protagonists and so vivid in its desciption, that if books were to be chosen rather than music for a Desert Island, this would have to be one of the eight! I believe it to be an unforgettable read!