Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez
Sometime in a timeless South America, a rabid dog bites four people. Three die, but Sierva María, a 12-year-old girl, seems untouched by the virus.
However, as time passes, a mild fever leaves her neglectful and unloving parents, the inadequate Marquis de Casalduero and his coke-addicted second wife Bernada, wondering whether she's still about to fall victim to the madness, and her father seeks medical advice.
But at the same time, word of the child's eccentric behaviour has reached the local bishop, who is convinced that she's been possessed and needs to be exorcised. Convincing her father to place her in a convent, he puts her in the care of Father Cayetano Delaura.
The priest has some learning from banned books, and remains unsure whether Sierva Marí really is possessed, despite her aggression to those holding her prisoner, her perpetual lies and her ability to speak three African languages (she was brought up by the slaves at home).
The nuns react hysterically toward her, convinced that everything bad that happens in the convent can be laid at her door, and imagining all sorts of weird happenings. The Abbess wants her gone. And the child either refuses to be drawn out or else plays along with their games, happily going along with the idea that she's possessed.
But as Delaura tries to convince himself of reason and delay any exorcism, he finds himself falling in love.
A fascinating 1996 novel from Gabriel García Márquez, drenched in superstition and religion and heat and cruelty, but still somehow concluding that, even though love itself is a form of madness, of possession, it is ultimately a positive and redemptive force.
The shock here – and it is a shock – is that at a time of thought and reason, as exemplified by Voltaire (whose works are mentioned), so much cruelty could be deployed in the name of love and saving a child's soul. But Márquez sees this as being a world in which learning is distrusted and banned, where religion is superstition, where death is a release and the convent, supposedly a place of life, is somewhere where 'the living are interred'.
Sometime in a timeless South America, a rabid dog bites four people. Three die, but Sierva María, a 12-year-old girl, seems untouched by the virus.
However, as time passes, a mild fever leaves her neglectful and unloving parents, the inadequate Marquis de Casalduero and his coke-addicted second wife Bernada, wondering whether she's still about to fall victim to the madness, and her father seeks medical advice.
But at the same time, word of the child's eccentric behaviour has reached the local bishop, who is convinced that she's been possessed and needs to be exorcised. Convincing her father to place her in a convent, he puts her in the care of Father Cayetano Delaura.
The priest has some learning from banned books, and remains unsure whether Sierva Marí really is possessed, despite her aggression to those holding her prisoner, her perpetual lies and her ability to speak three African languages (she was brought up by the slaves at home).
The nuns react hysterically toward her, convinced that everything bad that happens in the convent can be laid at her door, and imagining all sorts of weird happenings. The Abbess wants her gone. And the child either refuses to be drawn out or else plays along with their games, happily going along with the idea that she's possessed.
But as Delaura tries to convince himself of reason and delay any exorcism, he finds himself falling in love.
A fascinating 1996 novel from Gabriel García Márquez, drenched in superstition and religion and heat and cruelty, but still somehow concluding that, even though love itself is a form of madness, of possession, it is ultimately a positive and redemptive force.
The shock here – and it is a shock – is that at a time of thought and reason, as exemplified by Voltaire (whose works are mentioned), so much cruelty could be deployed in the name of love and saving a child's soul. But Márquez sees this as being a world in which learning is distrusted and banned, where religion is superstition, where death is a release and the convent, supposedly a place of life, is somewhere where 'the living are interred'.
