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Summary: Mystical love
Review: Márquez is best at those moments when he writes about the intimacy between a man and a woman. Somehow he mystifies love, gives it a pagan aura, yet he does not debase it nor idealistically exalt it, nor does he place any kind of moral judgment on it. He celebrates love for the simple yet mysterious natural thing that it is. This book, like Love in the Time of Cholera, had moments of sublime literary beauty when Márquez describes the communion of two people, in this case it is all-consuming bond between the unruly Sierva Mariá, the neglected viceroy's daughter who grew up among slaves, and Father Cayetano Delaura, a bookish priest with a passion for romantic poetry. Father Delaura falls in love with Mariá, whose fiery copper hair trails past her feet, when he is assigned to oversee her exorcism, for she is thought to be possessed by the devil after being bitten by a rabid dog. Their illicit affair is doomed from the start, but with those nights of passion in Mariá's cell where she is inhumanely kept like a heretic, they manage to transcend physical as well as spiritual confinements. I like the quick pace of the book, which does not digress as in his other "love" novel, but the characters where not as fully developed.
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Summary: Poetic and mysterious...So real and simultaneously dreamlike
Review: Marquez tells of a love story in a different way, mingling the love with death, history and darkness. Still, beautifully captures the essence.
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Summary: Absolutely wonderful!!!
Review: Marquez weaves his magic once again
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Summary: anxious
Review: My friend Patricia is going to read the book, and she can't wait. She has read the other online reviews and her blood is racing through her body.When she finishes the book, i'm sure you'll read her review someday.
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Summary: What a Splendid book
Review: No one can fuse logic and magic like marquez. In "Of love and other demons", a beautifully lush and colourful book, marquez seeks to examine the blured relationship between love and logic. It is about a young girl who is bitten by a rabid dog on her birthday. Subsequently, after failed attempts to cure her, she is suspected of infact being possessed. As a measure, she is sent to a nearby convent, and Priest Delaura (relatively young but dynamic) is sent to take charge of this matter. However, he falls deeply in love with her, and comes to believe that she is infact not at all possessed. He is a voice of reason, in an otherwise ignorant and paranoid world. This may sound dry on one level, but that is what makes marquez such a phenomenon. The prose is bursting with life. You read as if mesmerised by all the dreams, motivations and love. It is a passionate love story, but also "tragic" in a sense. MArquez portrays love as a demon of sorts, in that it can take over a seemingly controlled individual (in the case of Delaura) much like demonic possession. Love is undeniably and incomparably fulfilling, yet heart breaking all at once. Read this short parable, and be enchanted by its utter beauty.
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Summary: Dark and Atmospheric, Beautiful Prose
Review: OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS is part fantasy, part reality, with some magical realism included, but it is totally Gabriel Garcia Marquez and it is one of my favorites.
Unlike Garcia Marquez's masterpiece, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE and the funny and poignant LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, OFLOVE AND OTHER DEMONS contains no real wit and is wholly dark and gloomy and filled with terror. The recipient of that terror is the book's protagonist, Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles, an aristocratic young girl in an unnamed Latin American port city.
Sierva Maria is the only child of Don Ygnacio de Alfaro y Duenas and Bernarda Cabrera. Both mother and father are terrible parents. Don Ygnacio spends his time cowering from life in a hammock in his garden, while his wife, who is addicted to cacao and fermented honey, strolls through the house naked, mourning the end of her wild affair with a slave named Judas Iscariote. Both Don Ygnacio and Bernarda are wholly unlikable, though Don Ygnacio does manage to redeem himself somewhat in the end. Because of her parents lack of availability, Sierva Maria spends her time with the black slaves that work on her father's plantation and, as a result, she is much more African in her outlook than she is Spanish.
One could envision Sierva Maria living out her days happily with the slaves, forgotten by both mother and father. The incident that drives the plot of this book, and the one that alters the course of Sierva Maria's life, however, is a bite on the ankle by a dog suspected of having rabies. Even though it's quite clear that the dog was not rabid, Don Ygnacio, on the advice of the local bishop, takes his daughter to a convent and decides that she much be exorcised of the demons that have, of course, come to possess her with the bite of the dog.
Once Don Ygnacio makes the decision to exorcise the demons from his daughter's life, a priest named Cayetano Delaura enters the picture and promptly falls in love with Sierva Maria, primarily because of her lush, coppery hair. Father Delaura greatly opposes Sierva Maria's familiarity with the African slaves, but it is a Jewish doctor, Abrenuncio de Sa Pereira Cao who opposes Father Delaura. Abrenuncio knows Sierva Maria hasn't been infected with rabies, but he has his hands full attempting to convince Don Ygnacio and the abbess of the convent in which Sierva Maria has become a prisoner.
The prose in this dark book is gorgeous, as beautiful as that in ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE even if it does lack the wit. It doesn't really matter because wit isn't needed in this story. The prose is lush, gorgeous, magical, limpid, luminous and poetic. It provides a perfect counterpoint to the harrowing story it tells.
OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS many not be Gabriel Garcia Marquez's masterpiece, but it is certainly one of the best books ever written. I would definitely recommend this book to everyone and it is certainly a good place to begin if you're a first time reader of Garcia Marquez.
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Summary: By Love Possessed
Review: Of Love and Other Demons opens with a description of the author/narrator, in 1949, reporting the excavation of a convent of Clarissan nuns, and seeing "a stream of living hair the intense color of copper" spill out of the crypt. The hair belongs to Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles, a marquise who is now two hundred years dead, the protagonist of this grotesque, terrible and gloomy story. This book is pure Garcia Marquez, so you know it has to be good. The world inhabited by the characters is an incredible one; one whose truths are as strange as its demonic magic. Although a love story of sorts, Of Love and Other Demons has none of the comic antics of Love in the Time of Cholera; it reminds one more of the spare and grim Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Sierva Maria is the only child of Don Ygnacio de Alfaro y Duenas, the second Marquis de Casalduero and Lord of Darien. Garcia Marquez describes him as "a funereal, effeminate man, as pale as a lily because the bats drained his blood while he slept." Don Ygnacio really doesn't do much with his time other than lie in a hammock and look at the world with fear and gloom in his heart. Bernarda Cabrera, the Marquis's second wife, is Sierva Maria's mother. She is as addict of violent sex, cacao and fermented honey; a woman from the merchant class who had formerly been in love with a slave named Judas Iscariote. Filled with hatred for her own child, Sierva Maria was brought up by black slaves and learned to worship Yoruban gods, sing African songs, speak African languages. Sierva, in fact, prefers the vital, alive slaves to the decadent and perverted Spaniards. Despite her odd parentage, Sierva is a happy child until the day she is bitten on the ankle by a strange dog. Even though the wound heals with no problem, her father, along with the religious authorities decides that she may be rabid, possessed by demons, and their barbarous attempts to exorcise her form the crux of this story. The chief exorcist, Cayetano Delaura, an intellectual priest whose secret passion is books of courtly romance, falls in love with the young Sierva and with her coppery hair and it is their love that will chart the course of Sierva's life. Father Delaura's opponent regarding Sierva is a Jewish doctor named Abrenuncio de Sa Pereira Cao. This man is the voice of reason in a world where sanity and reason become wild and twisted. His is the lone voice crying in the wilderness. There are many demons in this wonderful story of the fantastic, including love. The Bishop (a wonderful character) sees rabies as a manifestation of a demon-possessed body; a superstitious abbess finds a supernatural portent in every ordinary event. When Sierva asks her father if it is true that love conquers all, he answers, "It is true, but you would do well not to believe it." The real demons, however, are the beliefs held by both the Spanish and the Christians, a theme that has been explored my Garcia Marquez in other books. This is only heightened by the clash of cultures between them and the Africans with whom Sierva Maria has been growing up. Father Delaura believes "that what seems demonic to us are the customs of the blacks, learned by the girl as a consequence of the neglected condition in which her parents kept her." The Jewish doctor, Abrenuncio, believes the real danger for Sierva lies in the exorcism which she is undergoing. A fear of animals also dominates in this bleak and sad story. As a young boy, Ygnacio was terrified of all animals except chickens. But one day he observed a chicken at close quarters and "imagined it grown to the size of a cow, and realized it was a monster much more fearsome than any other on land or sea." He even tells himself, "I live in fear of being alive." The only animals left on his estate are mastiffs, which, strangely, he loves. Dogs play an important role in Of Love and Other Demons. Abrenuncio's name, Cao is Portuguese for "dog," and one of the characters meets a mysterious and watery death across a bridge "where they had just hung the carcass of a large, sinister dog so that everyone would know it had died of rabies. The air carried the scent of roses, and the sky was the most diaphanous in the world." Heady stuff? Maybe. But not for someone as talented as Garcia Marquez. Ultimately, Of Love and Other Demons asks the questions: What is body and what survives the death of the body? What is flesh and what is spirit? What is demonic? This isn't Garcia Marquez's very best book, but that doesn't matter; it is yet another tour de force from one of the century's most brilliant and original authors.
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Summary: totally loved this book
Review: ok, so i read this book and just fell in love with it.. i love marquez's writing style wherein he used few words to convey so much meaning and this just blew me away.. this is the first book that i've read by marquez and since i love it so much, i'm planning to read his other work soon.. obviously, i'm now a fan.. =D
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Summary: the marquez magic at its very best
Review: one of the finest books ever by marquez. his mercurial handling of the quick silver of words is at best display here. i find myself going back to this book time and again only to return unsatiated.
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Summary: Escape for an afternoon!
Review: Read this novel in an uninterrupted sitting and find yourself swept away by beautiful prose, unbelievable remedies, and the terrors and superstitions of another place and time! The plot of "Of Love" is well summarized in other reviews, but my recommendation is to approach it with no foreknowledge of what's ahead. Just allow yourself to fall in love with the tragic story of young Sierva Maria and her doomed lover, the bookish librarian/exorcist Cayetano Delaura. If you have ever found yourself wrapped up in the love affair of your dreams, you will sympathize with the many lost loves described throughout this wonderful novel! As other reviewers have noted, this novel is a perfect introduction to the luminous prose of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and will draw you into further explorations of his work.
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