From the Nobel
Prize-winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera, a startling new
novel — the story of a doomed love affair between an unruly
copper-haired girl and the bookish priest sent to oversee her exorcism.
Of
Love and Other Demons is set in a South American seaport in the
colonial era, a time of viceroys and bishops, enlightened men and
Inquisitors, saints and lepers and pirates. Sierva Maria, only child of a
decaying noble family, has been raised in the slaves' courtyard of her
father's cobwebbed mansion while her mother succumbs to fermented honey
and cacao on a faraway plantation. On her twelfth birthday the girl is
bitten by a rabid dog, and even as the wound is healing she is made to
endure therapies indistinguishable from tortures. Believed, finally, to
be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her
cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, the Bishop's protege, who has
already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal
train; who is already moved by this kicking, spitting, emaciated
creature strapped to a stone bed. As he tends to her with holy water and
sacramental oils, Delaura feels "something immense and irreparable"
happening to him. It is love, "the most terrible demon of all." And it
is not long before Sierra Maria joins him in his fevered misery.
Unsettling
and indelible, Of Love and Other Demons haunts us with its evocation of
an exotic world while it treats, majestically the most universal
experiences known to woman and man.
Ugh, this was not a read I would ever repeat and I don't plan on reading more by this author. It was dark, unenjoyable, and just depressing.
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