Of Love and Other Demons

Description

This is the penultimate novel in the career of the magician Gabriel García Márquez, written in 1994. In the novel’s introduction, Márquez claims that he went to investigate a news story about the relocation of graves in an old monastery, when a worker’s pickaxe revealed a braid of hair 22 meters and 10 centimeters long, ending in the skull of a young girl. The foreman, without surprise, confided in him what he considered a scientific fact: “Hair grows at a rate of one centimeter per month, even after death.” Márquez estimates that the braid had grown over two hundred years, connecting the incident to a legend his grandmother told him about a marquise who died at the age of twelve from a dog bite. Her auburn hair trailed behind her like a wedding dress, and she was revered by all the peoples of the Caribbean for her extraordinary miracles. Following this introduction, Márquez begins to reconstruct the life of the young girl who started behaving indecently. Her strange practices with slaves and servants reached the ears of the Church, leading to her being taken from her family and imprisoned in a convent to exorcise the demons from her body. However, the young bishop assigned to her falls in love with her, prompting the bishop to banish him to a leper colony, forbidding his return until he is cured of his love. The bishop also decides to subject the girl to exorcisms to rid her of her demons. After five sessions of exorcism and enemas, the warden enters to prepare her for the sixth session and finds her “dead with love, with radiant eyes and the skin of a newborn baby!”

Many enthusiasts of the novel consider it Márquez’s finest work. Beyond comparisons with his other masterpieces, such as “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “Of Love and Other Demons” embodies all of Márquez’s creative and intellectual hallmarks. It possesses the elegance of irony, the power of satire, and a triumph of life and love.