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Of Love and Other Demons (Vintage International) (Paperback)
Autor (Libros): Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Páginas:
160
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- U.S.$13.00
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- U.S.$9.36 Tipo de cambio
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- 28%
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Product Description
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.
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Pure human condition, vulnerablility, and nature, 2010-03-01
Por Emi
This fine novel was meant to be a Literature assignment. Once I opened it, however, I read it continuously whenever I had the time, which did not take long to finish! Marquez creatively describes the human condition so expressively and beautifully that I have not forgotten the characters' vices, dreams and situational miseries. He vividly expresses character vulnerabilty that allows the audience to seek understanding, if not desire to hop-in the novel for modern day intervention! The title was accurately appropriate for such a beautifully written novel!
2 de 3 votos han sido útiles para otras personas:
Masterful Mystical Realism, 2010-02-08
Por martti_s(gbdz)
Only a liar of the magnitude of Gabriel Garcia Marquez would get away with a story like this.
There is a somnolent town with a newspaper looking for something to write about, a reporter goes to look at an excavation going on at a monastery and witnesses an ocean of golden hair flowing from one of the graves.
And the story takes off as it is obvious that the tomb had to belong to a girl named Sierva Maria, born in a planned, hateful marriage of a marquis and the daughter of a petty merchant. The baby was born with bad omens, before time, umbilical cord around her neck and denied of maternal care.
Brought up by the slaves, she learns African languages, spirits and gods. She also has a way of moving gracefully without a sound, dancing like the flames of a bonfire and singing with a voice that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at all.
There is an epidemic of rage, the girl gets bitten by a dog and nearly dies -not because of the dogbite but because of all the well-meaning treatments. As people find the girl defending herself with all the instincts and vigor of a viper and a jaguar, it is decided that she has been possessed by demons.
Marquez cooks up a nice sauce of fear, superstition, Catholic and African traditions, people who lie just for the habit, rumors turning to truths, and the sad fact that whenever people make decisions, they are badly informed, agitated and influenced by malicious people.
I have met people who cannot stand Marquez's exaggerations, his use of screaming colors and pit black. I am not familiar with all the Catholic vocabulary, so there were quite a few words to look up. Well, this is how things are learned...
Is there a moral in Marquez's book?
Strangely, the answer is yes.
Sierva Maria's mother who had planned the marriage and hated every minute of it and her daughter also, degraded into an old fat hag addicted to fermented honey and sexual services bought from her slaves.
Sierva Maria's father who never had the courage to defend or approach her daughter succumbed in loneliness and misery, buzzards picking on his bones.
Sierva Maria's exorcist, after turning to her lover, loses courage and misses the chance to make something of his life.
Sierva Maria return to the dream that she and her lover had shared before they had met and gulps down the grapes that symbolize the days of her life and finally finds herself looking at the snowy landscape, alone.
So much lost life, so much suffering because of beliefs grounded on lies or nothing at all.
This book is a rare polished diamond of Magical Realism.
Gabriel Garcia Marquz has graduated from a Wise Man to a Magician.
2 de 2 votos han sido útiles para otras personas:
A masterpiece of the first order, 2009-12-14
Por Robert Moore
It is a mark of the genius of Gabriel Garcia Marquez that this is not his best book. It is a sign of his status among writers that it might not even be his second best work. But this says a great deal more about the brilliance of Garcia Marquez's books than it does about the quality of this short novel. I believe that as time goes by, this particular book will come to be regarded more and more highly. There are reasons for this. ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE is such a towering masterpiece that it would overshadow the work of any author. And a very long novel nearly as good as SOLITUDE, LOVE IN A TIME OF CHOLERA naturally attracts the next level of interest. The next best known of his books is probably CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD and for a very simple reason. College professors, attempting to select a book by Garcia Marquez to work into a college course, frequently turn to CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD, partly due to its extraordinary excellence and partly due to its brevity. There are very few short novels as superb as CHRONICLE and that is one reason why it is more frequently read than OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS, even though the latter is only very slightly longer than the former. One thing that this should alert us to that sometimes is obscured by the genius of SOLITUDE is that Garcia Marquez is incontestably one of the great masters of the short form in literature, whether short novels or short stories. His output isn't as large as some writers, but in quality he has few if any competitors.
What I find most amazing about Garcia Marquez's short novels is how rich and complex they are. A good contrast would be Hemingway's THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, a very great book in its own right, but one in which comparatively little happens compared to OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS. When you read the Hemingway story, you get the sense that very little occurs, but you enjoy the slow pace and the way Hemingway allows things to very mildly take their. Hemingway has a single, simple story to tell and he wants to take his time telling it. Garcia Marquez in a similar amount of space wants to create an entire universe, an 18th century world with different beliefs than our own, a cast of characters with richly detailed social relations determined by class, status, wealth, age, and religion. The amount of detail and degree of complexity contained within the pages of the novel is nothing short of spectacular, yet it never, ever feels like Garcia Marquez is overdoing things, that he is putting too much in his story, that he is pushing his subject too far. Instead, everything feels perfect. The story feels perfectly told.
Like many of Garcia Marquez's stories, the premise gives no real clue as to what the story will actually be about. The description of this book -- a thirteen-year-old girl who is bitten on her birthday by a dog with rabies is assessed both by doctors and by churchmen for signs of the disease -- is utterly incapable of doing justice to the novel. Like most of Garcia Marquez's stories, the plot is really quite secondary. What is important is the metaphysics of the situation, the depiction not of what happens, but of the things that can happen in this particular world. It is a world where a husband, lamenting the death of his wife, can find himself deluged with the folded paper birds that she excelled at when alive. And a world where a young girl's hair continues to grow after her death to the length of over twenty meters.
I especially enjoyed the way this particular book began. It begins in the voice of Garcia Marquez himself, recalling allegedly real life events from the late 1940s when he, as a reporter, was sent to report on the moving of several bodies from a former convent prefatory to it being torn down to accommodate a new luxury hotel. There, in the decaying monastery, we encounter most of the major characters that we will encounter in the novel. Here, at the beginning, they are undifferentiated by death; later, in the course of events, they will be distinguished by the roles that they play differentiated by rank, gender, and caste. The richness of the world that they inhabit would appear to be too complex for the length of the novel, but just as Garcia Marquez described himself as a magician, so he performed a magic trick in making a very, very big story fit into a very small number of pages.
I would rank this as not merely one of the finest works that I have read by Garcia Marquez, but as one of the greatest short novels that I have ever read. I absolutely must be read by anyone who loves either Garcia Marquez or great literature. It is pure genius.
1 de 2 votos han sido útiles para otras personas:
Of Love and Other Demons, 2009-10-27
Por Kellen Doeden
This is a decent book. The narration is a little boring, but being a translation, that is an understandable, minor problem. The events of the plot and what happens to Sierva Maria are both heart wrenching and fascinating. I feel what makes this book most interesting is how believable Garcia makes the events. We do not get to know Sierva Maria personally, but we understand her through other characters. This is an excellent book. I recommend it to most readers.
1 de 1 votos han sido útiles para otras personas:
Thought provoking and wonderful..., 2009-07-13
Por CoffeeGurl
Sierva Maria is twelve years old and beautiful, with the longest hair everyone has ever seen. But something is wrong with her. Her behavior isn't normal. She doesn't do what girls her age do. Her customs are too foreign, too unseemly. What's worse is that her behavior is at times unpredictable, even dangerous. What could it be? Could it be that she has rabies? After all, a rabid dog bit her not long ago. Or is it worse? Could she be possessed by a demon? Her father, the Marquis, thinks that the latter is a possibility, which is why he takes her to a convent. She is to be exorcized. But Cayetano Delaura, her exorcist, has his doubts. A devoted scholar, he studies Maria's behavior, and sees her wild ways as well as her gentler behavior. He also sees her shameless ability to tell lies. It appears that the answer is far simpler than anyone thinks -- a matter of nature versus nurture. As Cayetano learns about Maria's ways and how her parents had neglected her over the years, and how African slaves have raised her since her birth, he begins to have some forbidden feelings for the young girl...
Set in the Colonial Americas, Of Love and Other Demons is one of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most brilliant novels. Essentially a novella, for it only contains about 170-something pages, it is nevertheless a complex and thought provoking read, not the sort of book you'd pick for a day on the beach. It seems, among various things, a story of manners -- centered on the hypocrisies with noble families and the Catholic religion -- and how people refuse to look beyond what is acceptable. The language is dark and bold; nothing is sugarcoated. Numerous subjects could be discussed from this book alone, and you'd have to read it in order to fully understand it. Do you love South American literature with magical realism? Garcia Marquez is one of, if not the best in the genre. Very much recommended.
