Del amor y otros demonios - BookWyrm for Social Yetis

No cover — Gabriel García Márquez: Del amor y otros demonios (Spanish language, 1994, Editorial Sudamericana)

201 pages

Spanish language

Published Jan. 6, 1994 by Editorial Sudamericana.

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 …

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.

40 editions

Taylor Drew reviewed Of Love and Other Demons (Del Amor Y Otros Demonios) by Gabriel García Márquez

Jump scared by magical realism for some reason

3 stars

The problem with impulse purchases is that sometimes it means that you buy things that you wouldn't necessarily pick up. I tend to not really get what's going on with magical realism, and even though I read the description of this book, I didn't clock that it was magical realism or that it was written by a master of the style.

Let me have said, I didn't dislike it at all. In fact, I was really intrigued by the politics of the whole thing that kind of seems to be happening in the background of the magical realism elements. My knowledge of Columbia is pretty limited and my knowledge of the colonial period of South America and the slave trade as it worked there are equally weak. So reading about all of that interested me even though I was intense and confused the whole time.

Not bad. Anybody …

The problem with impulse purchases is that sometimes it means that you buy things that you wouldn't necessarily pick up. I tend to not really get what's going on with magical realism, and even though I read the description of this book, I didn't clock that it was magical realism or that it was written by a master of the style.

Let me have said, I didn't dislike it at all. In fact, I was really intrigued by the politics of the whole thing that kind of seems to be happening in the background of the magical realism elements. My knowledge of Columbia is pretty limited and my knowledge of the colonial period of South America and the slave trade as it worked there are equally weak. So reading about all of that interested me even though I was intense and confused the whole time.

Not bad. Anybody who likes magical realism and likes fiction from South America I will probably find something of value here. I'm definitely not mad I read it.