Of Love and Other Demons
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 1994 novel, translated into English by Edith Grossman, is set in an unnamed eighteenth-century Caribbean port modeled on colonial Cartagena. A twelve-year-old marquis's daughter named Sierva Maria, neglected by her parents and raised in the slave quarters where she has learned three African languages and a long string of Yoruba prayers, is bitten on the ankle by a stray dog at the city market. The dog turns out to be rabid, and as a precaution and a public relations move the local bishop has Sierva Maria locked into a convent on the rumor that she is possessed. The thirty-six-year-old priest assigned to perform her exorcism, the scholarly Father Cayetano Delaura, falls in love with her instead. Garcia Marquez built the book out of a colonial legend he heard as a young reporter, and it is one of his most concentrated, ghost-haunted late novels.
Also by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
What you might want to know about Of Love and Other Demons
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In an 18th-century Caribbean port, the neglected twelve-year-old daughter of a marquis is bitten by a rabid dog. As her hair grows wildly, the church declares her possessed. The priest sent to exorcise her falls in love with her instead.
Of Love and Other Demons is one of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's shorter and more accessible novels, around 150 pages. Most readers find it easier than One Hundred Years of Solitude. Edith Grossman's translation is widely recommended.
Yes, loosely. Garcia Marquez has said the novel was inspired by a 1949 newspaper assignment about a tomb in colonial Cartagena, Colombia, that contained the long red hair of a 12-year-old girl. The plot is invented.
Of Love and Other Demons was written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Of Love and Other Demons is a standalone novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, not part of a series.
Of Love and Other Demons is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
