THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 4, 1995 TAG: 9506010494
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JEFFREY H. RICHARDS
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
Alfred A. Knopf. 147 pp. $21.
IN AN INTRODUCTORY note to this short novel, Gabriel Garcia Marquez speaks in his own voice about an experience he had in 1949 as a young journalist. Watching the emptying of burial vaults inside an 18th-century convent, he observed among the removal of bones of various dignitaries and abbesses an enormous tress of hair, nearly 70 feet long, still attached to the skull of a young girl. Putting this hair and the name on the tomb with a legend he had heard from his grandmother, Garcia Marquez has re-created - with heavy doses of his brilliant imagination - the girl's story.
Sierva Maria is the 12-year-old daughter of the lassitudinous Marquis de Casalduero and his prematurely decaying, morbidly flatulent wife, Bernarda Cabrera. In the public market, where an African woman is being sold for her weight in gold, Sierva Maria is bitten by a dog. No one thinks anything of it, least of all the girl, until an Indian woman tells the Marquis that the dog was rabid. Others who were bitten die; the girl does not. When she later develops a fever, the skeptical physician Abrenuncio says the disease is probably not rabies. But the Marquis brings in various folk healers, and their brutal methods leave the girl sick and raving. Before long, she is sent to the convent for spiritual cures.
What follows is a story of possession. These are the days when heretics in Spanish-controlled territory are still sought out and when demons are thought to be ever-present enemies who need routing by exorcism. But the exorcist, Delaura, finds himself overcome by this extraordinary girl. Indeed, if anyone becomes possessed by a demon, it is he - a demon of love.
Failing at his exorcism of the girl, Delaura gets sent to work with lepers; yet he is so full of something larger than lust that he cannot leave her alone. In turn, his nearly mad devotion to her begins to infect her feelings as well. In the end, all official lines of inquiry, all rituals of the church, fail to contain the unloosed power of rabid love.
How much more subtle this novel is than a work like Thomas M. Disch's new book, The Priest. Disch's novel shows a possessed Catholic priest whose bizarre behavior, including pedophilia, is ultimately blamed on the structure of the church itself. For all its narrative cleverness, The Priest stomps on readers with an iron-booted conclusion.
In contrast, Of Love and Other Demons blends in such things as individual desire; 18th-century slave culture; skeptical rationalism vs. church policy; the rotten state of marriage among the titled classes; and a child who is both victim and stronger than all other characters. Intertwining the lives of the Marquis, his wives and lover, the Africans whose own rituals become mixed with those of the Spanish, and the confounded, contending church officials, Garcia Marquez creates an atmosphere in which almost anything can be believed.
Yet the introduction serves to remind us that though the setting is well in the past, something of the spirit of possession survives into the present. It is as if telling the story itself becomes for the author an exorcism of a gentle but persistent demon, the life of a girl whose hair has spread itself throughout the imagination of Garcia Marquez. We call it pleasure to read such a work, ignoring all the while that we have been bitten. MEMO: Jeffrey H. Richards is an English professor at Old Dominion University. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
by CNB