INTRODUCTION

Gabriel García Márquez's fiction is rooted in magical realism, and to read his work is to enter a world of fanciful occurrences and illusory images. Magical realism refers to fiction in which the realistic and the fantastic are mingled with the same intensity, and García Márquez is often described as a master of this technique. In fact, he has always insisted that the fantasy in his writing is derived from his journalistic approach to real life, saying, "Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America:" Like many of García Márquez's earlier works, magical realism colors Of Love and Other Demons throughout. It provides the novella's framework as it unfolds the tale of a haunting, bittersweet romance between an unruly young girl and a bookish priest.

Of Love and Other Demons opens with a letter from the author explaining the genesis of the story. As a young cub reporter working in Cartagena, Colombia in 1949, García Márquez was asked to cover the emptying of the burial crypts of a historic convent called Santa Clara, where generations of bishops and abbesses had been laid to rest. While witnessing this event, García Márquez recalls, "the stone shattered at the first blow of the pickax, and a stream of living hair the intense color of copper spilled out of the crypt...attached to the skull of a young girl." Startled by the discovery, he remembers the legend his grandmother told him as boy about "a little twelve-year-old marquise with hair that trailed behind her like a bridal train, who had died of rabies caused by a dog bite and was venerated in the towns along the Caribbean coast for the many miracles she had performed."

Against the background of the lush, coastal tropics, García Márquez creates the story of an impossible, yet undeniable, love. Of Love and Other Demons is set in a South American seaport during the colonial era, the home of bishops and viceroys, enlightened thinkers and Inquisitors, lepers and pirates. Sierva Mar'a de Todos los çngeles, the rebellious only child of a decaying noble family, has been raised by her father's slaves in their quarters behind his mansion. On her twelfth birthday she is bitten by a rabid dog and made to withstand therapies indistinguishable from tortures. Believed to be possessed, Sierva Mar'a is imprisoned in a convent, where she meets Father Cayetano Delaura, who has been sent to oversee her exorcism. Father Delaura, a protŽgŽ of the bishop, is unprepared for the transfiguring passion that Sierva Mar'a awakens in his soul. Of Love and Other Demons is the story of their love: improbable, deeply moving, and defying—even in death—the constraints of reason and faith.

ABOUT GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

The oldest of twelve children, Gabriel García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928, in the small, banana-growing town of Aracataca, Colombia. Like Fermina and Florentino, the protagonists of his novel Love in the Time of Cholera, his mother went to high school and studied piano, and his father, too poor to complete his medical studies, became a telegrapher. He grew up in the great, gloomy house of his maternal grandparents, raised on his grandmother's tales of spirits and dead ancestors, and the civil war stories of his grandfather, a retired colonel.

With a new baby born every year, there was no money for school tuition, and at thirteen García Márquez applied for and received a scholarship to a boarding school outside Bogotá. His teachers recognized a natural storyteller, a gift García Márquez believes some people are born with. "Some people have a sense of timing, of organization of facts," he told the Los Angeles Times Magazine in 1990. "After that, it is a long way to becoming a writer. You have to learn to write well. It is a technical process, a process of elaboration and a capacity to elaborate experiences." Though he would have preferred to study philosophy and letters, García Márquez studied law at the National University in Bogotá, because the degree was more practical and the schedule permitted him an afternoon job. He nonetheless made his way through the great works of literature. Influenced by Marxist professors and the desperate economic straits of many Latin Americans, García Márquez became a radical socialist.

By the time the university closed down in 1948 because of political unrest, García Márquez had sold several stories to the local newspaper, El Espectador. He left for Cartagena on the Caribbean coast, where he knew he could find work on a newspaper. In 1954 he returned to Bogotá to work again for El Espectador, establishing himself as a well-known journalist. The next year García Márquez's first book, Leaf Storm, was published after a seven-year search for a publisher. When his account of the true story behind the shipwreck of a Colombian naval destroyer displeased Rojas Pinilla, the Colombian dictator, the newspaper prudently sent him abroad. Writing short stories all the while, García Márquez worked as a freelance journalist in Paris, London, and Caracas, and in 1959 opened the Bogotá office of the Prensa Latina, the newly-created official press agency of Castro's Cuba. In 1958 he married his childhood sweetheart, Mercedes Barcha. His first child, Rodrigo, was born in 1959 and his second, Gonsalvo, in 1962.

A move to Mexico City was followed by four years in which García Márquez wrote no fiction at all. Then, one day in January 1965, as he was driving to Acapulco, the complete first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude suddenly came to him. He devoted eight to ten hours a day for eighteen months to his writing, emerging with a family saga that mirrors the history of Colombia. Published in 1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude became an international bestseller and is considered by many to be his masterpiece.

In 1982 García Márquez won the Nobel Prize for literature. His other works include four collections of short stories (No One Writes to the Colonel, Leaf Storm, Innocent ErŽndira, and Strange Pilgrims), the novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and the novels The Autumn of the Patriarch, In Evil Hour, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The General in His Labyrinth.

García Márquez lives on the southern edge of Mexico City, and spends time in Bogotá, Cartagena, Barcelona, Cuernavaca, and Paris. He tries to write a page a day, declaring it "terribly hard work, more so all the time. Every letter I write weighs me down, you can't imagine how much" (Seven Voices). García Márquez credits the computer for rescuing him from his perfectionist tendencies; he once went through an entire ream of paper typing the final, letter-perfect manuscript of a fifteen-page short story.

His leftist beliefs and close friendship with Fidel Castro have not endeared García Márquez to the U.S. State Department, which allows him to visit the United States only by special dispensation. He remains a devoted advocate of human freedom and is insistent that Europe and the United States should allow Latin America to develop its own identity—and make its own mistakes—at its own pace and without intervention. "Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change?" he demands.

Always looking for the story, García Márquez still writes occasional pieces of nonfiction. "When I write journalism, some people think I am writing literature. And I am very rigorous when I write journalism, very careful of reality," he told the Los Angeles Times Magazine. "But I have a way of selecting and seeing reality that is very literary.... I see things others don't." His interest lies in describing and storytelling rather than in making moral judgments or grand statements. "The writer is not here to make declarations," he once told his friend Mario Vargas Llosa, "but to tell about things."

Praise

"Luminous...demonstrates that one of the masters of the form is still working at the height of his powers." —The New York Times

"A work of considerable beguilement and edge.... García Márquez retains a vital and remarkable voice, and the pen of an angel." —The Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Captivating.... Of Love and Other Demons evokes the texture of a civilization, while its emotional range, from the comic to the mystical, exhibits a reach rarely found in fictions on a larger scale." —The Boston Globe

"The novel is continuing proof that García Márquez is the master of putting a lot of story into a small space.... [He] tells a story of forbidden love, but demonstrates once again the vigor of his own passion: the daring and irresistible coupling of history and imagination." —Time

"Dense and complex within the confines of its simplicity, Of Love and Other Demons offers a rich platter of food for thought. If the criteria for great literature has to do with gripping our attention with the bizarre or the unusual, and then adding new dimensions to our understanding of the familiar, Of Love and Other Demons qualifies." —USA Today

"With exquisite prose, García Márquez brings the magic, superstition and imposing power of the church to vivid life in a wondrous story of doomed and forbidden love." —People

Related Titles

If you enjoyed Of Love and Other Demons, you'll want to read these other works by Gabriel García Márquez, also available in paperback from Penguin:

Love in the Time of Cholera

Set in an unnamed country on the Caribbean coast of South America at the turn of the 19th century, this splendid novel describes the intertwined lives of Fermina Daza, her husband Dr. Juvenal Urbino, and Florentino Ariza, who has loved Fermina unrequitedly for fifty-one years, nine months, and four days. It is a story of love in all its guises, young and old, carnal and chaste, and even in the time of cholera.

"Humane, richly comic, almost unbearably touching in its final pages, Love in the Time of Cholera is altogether extraordinary. Admirers of One Hundred Years of Solitude may find it hard to believe that García Márquez can have written an even better novel. But that's what he's done." —Newsweek

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The General in His Labyrinth

This compelling portrait of S'mon Bol'var, the Great Liberator of South America, is set in the legendary General's final days. Forced from power, ravaged by his years of passion and intrigue, the General looks back on the triumphant shaping of a continent and a nightmare of loss and disillusion.

"Passage after passage shines with the brilliance of Mr. García Márquez.... He has invented some of the magic characters of our age. His General, however, is not only magic, but real." —The Wall Street Journal

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Strange Pilgrims

These twelve haunting stories, in the author's words, examine "the strange things that happen to Latin Americans in Europe": a deposed leader survives on the casual kindness of strangers, the breakdown of a rented car strands a woman in a mental hospital, a father carries the miraculously preserved body of his daughter around Rome in a cello case, a honeymoon turns into a mysterious nocturnal journey. Combining terror and nostalgia, surreal comedy and the commonplace, Strange Pilgrims is a triumph of narrative sorcery.

"These tales knit together Mr. García Márquez's natural storytelling talents with his highly tuned radar for images that bridge the world of reality and the world of dreams."—The New York Times

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Available in Spanish editions from Penguin Ediciones:

Del amor y otros demonios
(Of Love and Other Demons)

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Del amor en los tiempos delc—lera
(Love in the Time of Cholera)

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Noticia de un secuestro
(Notice of a Kidnapping)

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AN INTERVIEW WITH GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

In an illuminating 1981 interview with The Paris Review, Mr. García Márquez revealed some of the early influences on his writing. He also discussed inspiration, intuition, imagination, and the relationship between journalism and fiction. Here is an excerpt from that conversation.

How did you start writing?

By drawing. By drawing cartoons. Before I could read or write I used to draw comics at school and at home. The funny thing is that I now realize that when I was in high school I had the reputation of being a writer, though I never in fact wrote anything. If there was a pamphlet to be written or a letter of petition, I was the one to do it because I was supposedly the writer. When I entered college I happened to have a very good literary background in general, considerably above the average of my friends. At the university in Bogotá, I started making new friends and acquaintances, who introduced me to contemporary writers. One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka: I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, "As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect...." When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories. They are totally intellectual short stories because I was writing them on the basis of my literary experience and had not yet found the link between literature and life. The stories were published in the literary supplement of the newspaper El Espectador in Bogotá and they did have a certain success at the time—probably because nobody in Colombia was writing intellectual short stories. What was being written then was mostly about life in the countryside and social life. When I wrote my first short stories I was told they had Joycean influences.

Had you read Joyce at that time?

I had never read Joyce, so I started reading Ulysses. I read it in the only Spanish edition available. Since then, after having read Ulysses in English as well as a very good French translation, I can see that the original Spanish translation was very bad. But I did learn something that was to be very useful to me in my future writing—the technique of the interior monologue. I later found this in Virginia Woolf, and I like the way she uses it better than Joyce. Although I later realized that the person who invented this interior monologue was the anonymous writer of the Lazarillo de Tormes.

Are dreams ever important as a source of inspiration?

In the very beginning I paid a good deal of attention to them. But then I realized that life itself is the greatest source of inspiration and that dreams are only a very small part of that torrent that is life. What is very true about my writing is that I'm quite interested in different concepts of dreams and interpretations of them. I see dreams as part of life in general, but reality is much richer. But maybe I just have very poor dreams.

Can you distinguish between inspiration and intuition?

Inspiration is when you find the right theme, one you really like; that makes the work much easier. Intuition, which is also fundamental to writing fiction, is a special quality which helps you to decipher what is real without needing scientific knowledge, or any other special kind of learning. The laws of gravity can be figured out much more easily with intuition than anything else. It's a way of having experience without having to struggle through it. For a novelist, intuition is essential. Basically it's contrary to intellectualism, which is probably the thing that I detest most in the world—in the sense that the real world is turned into a kind of immovable theory. Intuition has the advantage that either it is, or it isn't. You don't struggle to try to put a round peg into a square hole.

Do you think the novel can do certain things that journalism can't?

Nothing. I don't think there is any difference. The sources are the same, the material is the same, the resources and the language are the same. The Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe is a great novel and Hiroshima is a great work of journalism.

Do the journalist and the novelist have different responsibilities in balancing truth versus the imagination?

In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.

"Gabriel García Márquez" by Peter H. Stone, from Writers at Work, Sixth Series by George A Plimpton, editor. Copyright (c) 1984 by The Paris Review, Inc. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Of Love and Other Demons is based on two occurrences from Gabriel García Márquez's past, one an event he covered as a reporter and the other a legend told to him by his grandmother. Why does he choose to root the novella partly in his own history and experience and partly on a legend? How does this merging of a factual event and a fantasy help create the magical realism that forms the novella's foundation? What elements of magical realism do you see throughout the novella?
    
2. Sierva Mar'a favors pickled iguana and armadillo stew, learns to dance before she can speak, sings in Yoruban, Congolese, and Mandingo, and wears a Santer'a necklace over her baptism scapular. Dominga de Adviento, the formidable black woman who runs the household, happily practices both Catholic and Yoruban beliefs because "what she did not find in one faith was there in the other." Does Sierva Mar'a also find comfort in both faiths? At one point Sierva Mar'a's mother, Bernarda, remarks in annoyance, "The only thing white about that child is her skin." Is Bernarda right? Is Sierva Mar'a at home in both cultures or neither?
    
3. Depressed, idle, effeminate, and uneducated, Don Ygnacio is "as pale as a lily because the bats drained his blood while he slept." During his daughter's cruel treatment for rabies, the Marquis awakens to "the new joy of knowing he loved her as he had never loved in this world." Yet he delivers her that day to the Convent of Santa Clara. Why does he relinquish his daughter and ultimately leave her deliverance in the hands of Father Cayetano Delaura and the physician Abrenuncio? Is Sierva Mar'a aware of her father's love? Why, in the convent, does she declare she would rather die than see him?
    
4. In contrast to her husband, Bernarda is ravaged by her addictions, vomits bile, breaks wind "in pestilential explosions that startled the mastiffs," and turns her back on her "freak" of a daughter. Why does García Márquez portray Sierva Mar'a's mother as such a grotesque?
    
5. In the beginning of the story, Bernarda states that Sierva Mar'a "wouldn't tell the truth even by mistake." When Sierva Mar'a first enters the convent she meets Martina, "one of the few white women to whom she had told the truth." Later she names for Martina six demons that are supposedly inside of her and takes "delight in the deception." Why does Sierva Mar'a lie? Is it merely childish behavior? In what other instances does she lie, and how relevant are her lies to the story?
    
6. When assigned to exorcise Sierva Mar'a, Delaura is reminded of his painful awkwardness with women. To him they seem "endowed with an untransferable use of reason that allowed them to navigate without difficulty among the hazards of reality." What does this mean? Are the female characters in the book more rational than the male ones? Are they as fully rendered?
    
7. García Márquez evokes a time in Spanish American history when even the colonial magistrates, sent by the Spanish king to govern the colonies, have been affected by the Enlightenment. However, the colonies are ruled, in effect, by viceroys and powerful clerics, and by a belief in the supernatural. In this brief exchange the Bishop confesses his homesickness to Delaura:
   
   "The very idea that they have already slept tonight in Spain fills me with terror."
   
   "We cannot intervene in the rotation of the earth," said Delaura.
   
   "But we could be unaware of it so that it does not cause us grief," said the Bishop. "More than faith, what Galileo lacked was a heart."
   
   How does this exchange reflect the cultural shift taking place?
    
8. Sierva Mar'a claims to know what demons look like, chooses to live in filth, declares herself "worse than the plague," "bewitches" the visiting Vicereine, and presents Delaura with "the fearful spectacle of one truly possessed." Yet, as the priest points out to the Abbess, the assignation of her powers to Satan rather than God is completely arbitrary. Is Sierva Mar'a indeed possessed? Why is it so important for the Abbess to believe that she is? If not, why does Sierva Mar'a shake her head in answer to the Marquis's question "Do you know who God is?"
    
9. When the bishop finds him "writhing on the floor in a mire of blood and tears," Delaura says, "It is the demon, Father. The most terrible one of all." What is Delaura's demon? The Bishop banishes Delaura because he "had not confined himself to facing the demons with the unappealable authority of Christ, but had committed the impertinence of discussing matters of faith with them." To which demons is the Bishop referring? To what others does the book's title refer?
    
10. "Sierva," servant of God, is also the Spanish word for slave. Illiterate, silent, and conceived without love, Sierva Mar'a is to a large degree a cipher, a blank slate on which her script is written by those around her. At her birth the midwife predicts, "It won't live," Dominga de Adviento sings out, "She will be a saint," and the Marquis declares, "She will be a whore." To what degree is Sierva Mar'a the mistress of her own fate? Does she in any way propel her own death?
     
11. Before she leaves home for the convent, Sierva Mar'a asks her father if love conquers all, as the songs said. "Yes," he tells her, "but you would do well not to believe it." Does she die believing it? Does her and Delaura's love triumph?