Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez

Cross posted on Guiltless Reading.

A demon of a writer, that's Gabo.

About Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez: On her twelfth birthday, Sierva Maria, the only child of a decaying noble family in an eighteenth-century South American seaport, is bitten by a rabid dog. Believed to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels something shocking begin to occur. He has fallen in love, and it is not long until Sierva Maria joins him in his fevered misery.

Unsettling and indelible, Of Love and Other Demons is an evocative, majestic tale of the most universal experiences known to woman and man.

My two cents

I first read this in 2004 and fell in love with it immediately because of Marquez's gorgeous language and a love story steeped in the religion and superstition of 18th century Colombia. I dug up my old copy so I could reread it for the Read the Nobels 2016.

But you already know I wax poetic over Marquez having read a number of his books. I already know that I can never write a review that does this book justice. I have been agonizing over this review for far too long that I know if I don't just write it, I will never hit publish. So here goes ...

The inspiration

I always find it fascinating to learn where authors derive inspiration for their stories. Inspiration alone makes me wonder about Gabo who opens his book with two and a half pages explaining just that: in 1949, cub reporter Marquez in search of a news story visited the historic Convent of Santa Clara in Colombia where burial crypts were being removed to give way to a five-star hotel (you can see the proof here of what replaced the convent).

Marquez witnesses the wholly unsentimental exhuming of bishops and abbesses buried there for hundreds of years. Until they come upon a crypt of a young girl whose copper hair fairly bursted out of the crypt ... all 22+ meters of it! Hair grows even in death and based on scientific calculations, the young girl had been dead for over 200 years.

If fact wasn't strange enough, Marquez makes an uncanny connection with a legend he heard in his boyhood: a marquise with coppery hair that trailed behind her, venerated by many for the miracles she performed, who died of rabies. Talk about serendipity! And I am always in awe of how Marquez is able to weave something beautiful, with his brand of magical realism!
 

The story

Surprisingly the plot is extremely simple. Set in the 1740s in the remote South American port town called Cartagena de Indias, twelve-year-old Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles, is bitten by a rabid dog. The only daughter of a moneyed, prestigious yet decaying family, is sadly unloved and brought up by the black slaves that served them. She grows up as an oddity, obviously white in appearance but with the language, customs and superstitions of the blacks. 

News around the town is the rabid dog is dead and those who were bitten were suffering or dead. Although Sierva María's bite wound is insignificant and she exhibits no symptoms of rabies, the news travels far and wide. Her father, attacked by his conscience, only wants to quell rumours and he seeks out doctors to cure her. When regular doctors fail, quack doctors render painful treatments, resulting in Sierva María's violently resistance. Combined with her black behaviour, she is believed to possessed and then the news reaches the Bishop.

Sierva María is brought by her father to the convent of Santa Clara and the Bishop's protégé Father Cayetano Delaura is tasked to perform the rites of exorcism. Face to face with Sierva María, he is unprepared to fall in love, the "most terrible demon of them all." This love story plays itself out in all glory and all its tragedy.

The powers of love and passion

The themes of love and passion are replete, as is its unbidden powers for good and also the ability to destroy. The main love story is that of Sierva María and Father Cayetano Delaura, a forbidden love between a priest and a teenager believed to be possessed. However, there are more love stories that play themselves out, also unusual and tragic.

There is the sad union of Sierva María's parents, Don Ygnacio de Alfaro y Dueñas and his rapacious second wife Bernarda Cabrera -- a marriage borne not out of love but of trickery and deceit. His first wife who died early meanwhile was a marriage borne out of the desire to observe propriety and ensure stability of wealth. Don Ygnacio felt he had no choice but to spurn his true love but ended up living a life devoid of love all this life.

Bernarda meanwhile is a larger-than-life character (probably my favourite in this book) who schemes to win Don Ygnacio through her sexuality. But it is her unquenchable sexual appetite that is also her downfall, destroying her beautiful body and practically selling her soul to an equally rapacious slave.

Colonization and the Church

What stands out to me is this book's milieu. It is a time where the Catholic Church ruled supreme and everyone followed unquestioning, or risk the so-called fires of hell. Traditional cultures were usurped as countries were colonized by the Catholic Church. Traditional African cultures like Yoruban, Congolese and Mandingo had belief systems that were at odds with or were misunderstood, and by default anything that ran counter to Catholic Church belief was believed to be heretic, demonic. This was exacerbated by the fact that scientific thought was also believed to be heretic and superstition became yet another layer of ignorance for the common person.

Sierva María was the poor victim of cruelty borne out of this ignorance. Despite no symptoms of rabies, her unusual behaviours had their explanation in being raised by Dominga de Adviento, the formidable black woman who taught Sierva María to live as black. At one point Bernarda remarks that "The only thing white about that child is her skin" and sadly Sierva María lived in both cultures but never really fit in either.

The people who did understand Sierva María's true situation -- Abenuncio, and later on another priest -- were in the minority and whose voices did not hold sway in the wake of the powers-that-be of the formidable Bishop and the convent's ignorant Abbess.

Characters to empathize with

Do you know how some books leave you cold because the characters are so unlikeable or you simply develop no connection with? I have read the multiple times and I am entranced by how multi-dimensional and oftentimes how complicated these characters are. I felt Sierva María's frustration and annoyance at those "ridiculous white people." I understood why Delaura sought penance for succumbing to his love for Sierva María. I felt as conflicted as Don Ygnacio to save his daughter's soul while sending her to certain death. What surprises me each time, though, is how much I gravitate towards Bernarda, who is probably among the most cruel, grotesque characters. I have a soft spot for her because of her intelligence (even though she is a brilliant scammer) and her desire, even desperation, to give to the one she loves.

Verdict

One of my favourite books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, its simple plot and easy to read language belies that fact that this forbidden love story is only a facade for a profound look at the effects of colonization on traditional cultures. I highly recommend this read!

Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez

Reviewed by Edith LaGraziana

Love is a very powerful emotion that can overwhelm even the strongest and most disciplined character, especially when it comes by surprise and for the first time. Love always feels like magic, but sometimes it appears to the outsider as if a potent spell has been cast on the lovers or only one of them. When the passion is so strong that it becomes harmful and destructive to the people concerned, it isn’t a long way to think that a demon must be at work. This is what happens in the historical novel Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez set in a time when and a place where superstition was common. It tells a story of first love under particularly unfavourable circumstances and between a most unlikely couple, namely between a scarcely adolescent girl alleged of being possessed by demons and her already middle-aged exorcist in an eighteenth-century sea town somewhere in South America. 

Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in March 1927 (1928 according to other sources). He passed the first ten years of his life in the loving care of his maternal grandparents and the experience strongly influenced his writing. During his law studies at university he got involved in journalism, a career that he pursued for many years and that took him to Venezuela, Europe, the USA, and eventually Mexico for long stretches of time. He made his literary debut with the novella Leaf Storm (La hojarasca) in 1955 after having tried in vain for seven years to find a publisher. Fame didn’t come before 1967, though, when the author released One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad). Others of his notable works of the period are for instance Autumn of the Patriarch (El otoño del patriarca: 1975), and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Crónica de una muerte anunciada: 1981). In 1982 Gabriel García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his later novels above all Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos de cólera: 1985), The General in His Labyrinth (El general en su laberinto: 1989) and Of Love and Other Demons (Del amor y otros demonios: 1994) stand out from the rest of his life work. Gabriel García Márquez died in Mexico City, Mexico, in April 2014.

Being only twelve years old, Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles knows little Of Love and Other Demons that people see at work always and everywhere in the 1740s, especially in the remote South American port town where she has passed all her life. Her parents are Don Ygnacio de Alfaro y Dueñas, Marquis de Casalduero and Lord of Darién, and his second wife Bernarda Cabrera, but unloved and uncared for by them she has been brought up by their African slaves learning their languages as well as their customs. One day she is bitten by a stray dog. The wound is insignificant, just a graze at the left ankle that heals without leaving a trace, and yet it subjects the girl to gossip because the dog was rabid and superstition has it that she must therefore be possessed by a demon. When her father hears of it, he moves Sierva María from the slaves’ quarters in the courtyard to a room in the run-down mansion. Unaccustomed to the environment and the company of her father who is a complete stranger to her, she is terrified. That he has doctors come to treat her makes things still worse since they only succeed in making her sick in fact letting blood and infecting the wound. Moreover, they spread the rumour of her (seemingly) crazy behaviour that eventually reaches the Bishop. He orders that Sierva María be taken to the convent of Santa Clara where an annoyed and superstitious abbess puts her into a prison cell right away. Father Cayetano Delaura is sent to perform the rites of exorcism to save the girl’s soul, but meeting the scared teenager with the long train of copper-coloured hair the priest in his late thirties falls in love for the first time in his life…

As is characteristic of all works classed as magical realism, also in the short novel Of Love and Other Demons reality blends convincingly with imagination. Here the author’s starting points were the excavation of a convent that after two hundred years brought to light the skull of a girl with exceptionally long hair the colour of copper attached and an old legend about just such a girl who died from rabies. The story told certainly is about love in all its different shades and about the sometimes destructive force of passion, but at the same time it exposes the dangers of ignorance and half-knowledge that nurture fear along with prejudice and superstition leading to boundless hatred and intolerance. As we all know, throughout centuries the Catholic Church (but also other powers) demonised communities, behaviour and thoughts that were or just seemed to be at odds with the accepted doctrine although love even of the enemy is at the heart of the Christian faith and should rule all actions of the faithful. The result was much cruelty that often wasn’t even perceived as such like in the case of Sierva María or the violent evangelising of the indigenous population of new colonies. Although the plot is concise, it is also dense and multilayered allowing interpretation from very different angles. The characters making an appearance in the novel are marvellously varied and depicted in the necessary psychological depth to understand their motives and actions. Despite its high literary quality the book is a quick, easy and pleasurable read.

In fact, I enjoyed Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez so much that I re-read the slim volume to be able to write this review today, i.e. years after the original experience. The love story between Sierva María and Father Cayetano Delaura itself didn’t particularly interest me although it isn’t an ordinary one, either. I definitely preferred the historical background and the variety of characters or rather types peopling it, but most of all I loved the fact that the book made me think. Not all Nobel laureate produced novels that I would recommend as readily for reading as this one!

Original post on Edith's Miscellany:

http://edith-lagraziana.blogspot.com/2015/10/of-love-and-other-demons-by-gabriel-garcia-marquez.html