Of Love And Other Demons Essay, Research Paper

Of Love and Other Demons

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1928, in Aracata, Colombia a town off the Atlantic Ocean. Marquez was the first of sixteen children of Gabriel and Lusia Marquez. Soon after Marquez birth his family moved and left him to stay with his grandparents, who told him stories of ghosts and other super natural beings. Marquez graduated high school in 1946 and went to college at the National University of Colombia in 1947 to study law. In 1954 he became a reporter for the newspaper El Espectador, after this he started his literary career. Marquez has received much criticism over the years for his literary works.

The book that I read is called Of Love and Other Demons this book is about a girl named Sierva Maria who was bit by a rabid dog. After being bit by the dog it was believed that she was now possessed by a demon.

Well you have in no way succeeded, said the bishop. It is an open secret that your poor child rolls on the floor in obscene convulsions, howling the gibberish of idolaters. Are these not the unequivocal symptoms of demonic possession?

The Marquis was aghast.

What do you mean?

That one of the demon s numerous deceptions is to take on the appearance of a foul disease in order to enter an innocent body. (Marquez 55)

Then Sierva Maria is sent to a Convent in Santa Clara where a priest by the name of Cayetano Delarura is to perform her exorcism. When Cayetano first sees her it unnerves him the girl lay on her back on the stone bed with no matters, her feet and hands bound she seemed dead (Marquez 81). Delarura has dreams about the girl. He goes to her in spite of the fact that the girl attacks others. He continued to see her even after she attacked him. After a few visits and treating her wounds, he begins to fall in love with her.

He had no room in his heart for anything but Sierva Maria, and even so it was not large enough to hold her. He was convinced that no oceans or mountains, no laws of earth or heaven, no powers of hell could keep them apart. (Marquez 122)

After Delaura falls in love with her, from here on he sneaks in to the convent at night to see her. One morning after Delarua sneaks out of her cell the nuns come to take her to be exorcised. Sierva Maria was just falling asleep after Cayetano had left the cell, when with no warning they came to begin the exorcism (Marquez 128). After this, they blame her for another prisoner s escape through the tunnel that Delarua has been using to sneak in to see her. The nuns block off the tunnel and move her to a more secure cell. Delarua did know that her cell was moved so when he came looking for her he was stopped by two nuns and was sent to work at a hospital for Lepers. Eventually, Sierva Maria died during her fifth exorcism.

This book is one of Gabriel Marquez s less popular books but it has been said that this book shows that even after having a huge hit and winning the Nobel Prize in 1983 for literature, all the notoriety did not spoil his ability. The themes of his books are similar in nature.

When one considers that the patterns and underpinnings of Garc a M rquez’s work virtually compel a MYTHOLOGICAL treatment,and when one reflects further on the fact that man-woman relationships, and the analogous issue of woman’s restricted roles within traditional Latin cultures, have always been a theme of Garc a M rquez’s fiction, from his earliest stories through Of Love and Other Demons (1994), thus calling for GENDER-based analysis of his work.(Longman 1)

This book is compared to other novels written by Marquez, in the article by Jack Shreve.

A.S Byatt of the New York Times Book Review, observes that in the novel all the ineluctable, irrational fatality of Chronicle of a Death Foretold without the comic and inconsequential gentleness of love in The Time of Cholera. (Shreve 2)

In reading Articles about Gabriel Garcia Marquez I found that he is a very respected writer and after reading this book and researching this paper his style intrigued me to find other books that he has written.