Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has always fascinated me to no ends.
I have always had the opportunity to read quite a few number of his novels. His unique style of writing is just magical - he follows reality on tiptoe later to transcend it in an uproarious manner which he uses to enthral his readers in many phalanxes of caustic reality bordering on surrealism a la Latin American genre as envisaged by legendary film director Luis Bunnuel.

Very recently one of my friends showed the courtesy by passing me his copy of Marquez's OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS proved to be simply irresistible to be. The story is set in the slave market of a Columbian seaport where the Marquis family lived with their godforsaken twelve-year-old daughter Sierva Maria. The story begins when she was bitten by a rabid dog. Cases of rabies were neither limited nor insignificant in the history of the city. But nobody cared too much about the bite. The wily and wise physician Abrenuncio professed in his soothsaying, "No medicine cures what happiness cannot." Then what happened to her?

At long last the Marquis sent her packing to the nearby convent of Santa Clara to lead lead a ghetto-like life there. Tortured and quarantined, she became more and violent and behaved in an uncouth manner. The convent people thought that she had been possessed by the evil spirit of a Black Witch and as such they decided forcibly to exorcise her of the virulent demons of her sickness. The young priest Cayetano Delaura was entrusted with that job.

Delaura took charge of her with his heart out. Most compassionately he delved deep into her tender psyche and eventually he surreptitiously fell for her in love. But all his solemn and sober designs to win her heart and favour came to a sombre end. And she died a tragic death as if to be cured in full bloom of happiness bereft of worldly pains and cursed superstitions. And the unrequited young lover of her vanished into the with bated breath of shame and self-indulgence.

To me, Abrenuncio's soothsaying is the moot point of this passionate love story and that revolves about the enchantment and disenchantment that Marquez is so apt to deliver and display his satiric characters in wigwagging shades of hope and despair. Like his all other novels, he profusely uses mythical and biblical allusions in many splendours to leave his readers in a world of phantasmagoria. He weaves the pattern in a web of his inimitable style and his all too familiar magic realism carries his readers to a far flung world of myth, mystery in a seemingly supernatural ambience.