Garcia Marquez, Of Love and Other Demons

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. I said 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. Eros is missing; 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. 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. In addition, we feel the juxtapositions of physical adjectives and verbs that qualify abstract nouns ("The city lay submerged in its centuries-long torpor" "simmering in rancor"). 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 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." The writing techniques I employ in this article are all explained in Mary Duffy's bestseller and indispensable writing manual: www.write rivetingprose.com Augustine, City of God Austen J, Pride and Prejudice Austen J, "Marriage Proposals and Me" Austen J, Emma Borges, The Aleph C. Bronte, Jane Eyre Burroughs E,Tarzan Cervantes, Don Quijote Chaucer, Wife of Bath Coelho P,The Alchemist Coyle H, They Are Soldiers Dante, New Life Dickens C, David Copperfield Dostoevsky, Crime&Punishment ConanDoyle,Hound of Baskervilles Dubner S, Superfreakonomics DuMaurier D, Rebecca Ellis B. E. American Psycho Fitzgerald S, Great Gatsby Flaubert G, Madame Bovary Fleming I,Doctor No Freud S, Leonardo Da Vinci Friedan B, Feminine Mystique GarciaMarquez, Of Love & OtherDemons GarciaMarquez,OneHundredYrs Guerrero M,ThePoison Pill Grass G, The Tin Drum Harris T, Hannibal Rising Heidegger M,House of Being Ishiguro K, Remains of The Day Johnson S,Rasselas Kafka,Metamorphosis Kosinski J, The Painted Bird Lee H,To Kill a Mockingbird McBain Ed,Gutter and Grave Murakami H,Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Nabokov V, Lolita Meyer, S, Twilight Ortega,Dehumanization of Art Poe E A, Gordon Pym Prose F, Reading Like a Writer Rushdie S,Midnight Children Sabatini R, Scaramouche Spark M, Prime of Miss Brodie Stendhal, Red and Black Sterne L,Tristram Shandy Stevenson R, Dr.Jekyll & Mr.Hyde Stoker B, Dracula Thackeray W,History of Pendennis Tolstoy L, Anna Karenina Trollope A, Autobiography Unamuno M, Tragic Sense of Life Voltaire, Candide Webb J, Fields of Fire Wharton E, The House of Mirth Woolf V, To The Lighhouse The secrets of 'no-doze' prose: Mary Duffy's Sentence Openers Image via Wikipedia Lindsey Vonn Back to main page

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