Review: Of Love and Other Demons

Of Love and Other Demons
by Gabriel García Márquez

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Of Love and Other Demons / 0-14-025636-9

Painful and bitter, "Of Love and Other Demons" explores the life and mind of a young girl abused, neglected, and persecuted to death by the adults around her.

Her father ignores her as inconsequential. Her mother resents her intrusion into her casual affairs so intensely that she places a bell around the girl's neck so that she can avoid the child at all times. The few small kindnesses she receives from servants who attend her set her further aside as foreign and unusual. When the poor girl falls ill after a rabies scare, she is deserted at a nunnery and promptly declared "possessed" by virtue of being an unusual, neglected child.

Those who would be kind to her at the nunnery are limited to a single priest, much older than her and more interested in her body than her soul. Tortured and neglected past all reckoning, the child is pointlessly slain and we alone are left to point the fingers at those who caused her death. Though fictional, this is a superb and scathing piece against those who would neglect their fellow humans to pursue their own pleasures and those who would torture others to assuage their own consciences.

~ Ana Mardoll

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