Eros is missing in this novella; nowhere do we find it. Instead we experience the demonization of human love that is a hatred of sexual attraction, approved and sanctioned by the Inquisition and the Catholic Church together with their rituals and insane exorcisms.

The absurd customs transplanted into Latin America from the motherland Spain make one shudder about the unbriddled power that was concentrated in the Church.

In this aptly titled novella, Of Love and Other Demons, Garcia Marquez demonstrates the evenness of his oeuvre, for it exhibits the same quality of his major work One Hundred Years of Solitude. And it is aptly titled because readers get to experience first hand a repugnant type of love that still exists in contemporary civilizations: a demonized love.

While in the American Colonies--later to become the United States--the founding fathers wrote in the Constitution that titles of nobility were anathema, in Latin American, nobility thrived and there was no separation of church and state. The heroine, Sierva Maria, the only child of a noble family endures the brutal punishments that the powerful Catholic Church inflicted on eccentrics, mad, possessed, demented, and ravid alike.

In the able hands of Edith Grossman, the translator, we enjoy Garcia Marquez's prose as he weaves his story through fragmented time. Events unfold smoothly--in a no nonsense manner, galloping ahead of us--to fill our senses with the sacred and the profane, with heresies, pagan rites, and cruelties. The work is mesmerizing.

The secret of Garcia Marquez's galloping narrative lays in his sentence openers, in his predilection of Past participles followed by prepositions: guided by, lashed by, dazed by, conquered by, defeated by, etc. A narrative much our parents used to trick with--apple sauce first, the aspirin next. That is what Garcia Marquez does with his phrases, clauses, and sentences.

[If you are a writer, but are rusty as to the proper use of phrases, clauses, and sentences, I'd recommend a refresher that will update you in no time. Get Mary Duffy's writing guide.]

In addition, Garcia Marquez forces us to feel the juxtapositions of physical adjectives and verbs that qualify abstract nouns ("The city lay submerged in its centuries-long torpor" "simmering in rancor.) This writers' trick is exposed by Longinus in his immortal book On The sublime:

     "I am loaded with woes and have no room for more." (Fifth source of the Sublime: word arrangement.)

In this novella Garcia Marquez reaches new heights of simplicity. Nowhere do we find the rhetorical turns of One Hundred Years; nowhere do we see the magic realism, nor do we feel the irreverent tone. His prose is terse; more grammatical than rhetorical. I underlined passages that show his already famous technique of enumerations.

Follow this expansive yet powerful description--more spiritual than physical--of Sierva Maria's father, the Marquis:

"In exhile he acquired his lugubrious appearance, cautions manner, contemplative nature, languid behavior, slow speech, and a mystic vocation that seemed to condemn him to a cloistered cell."

Gabriel Garcia Marques

Colombia