From Publishers Weekly
Marquez's tale of the love between a middle-aged priest and a young girl believed to be possessed by demons spent five weeks on PW's bestseller list..
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
From Library Journal
In a Latin American port city during colonial times, a young girl named Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles?the only child of the ineffectual Marquis de Casalduero?is bitten by a rabid dog. Her father, who has shown no interest in the child, begins a crusade to save her life, eventually committing her to the Convent of Santa Clara when the bishop persuades him that his daughter is possessed by demons. In fact, Sierva Maria has shown no signs of being infected by rabies or by demons; she is simply being punished for being different. Having been raised by the family's slaves, she knows their languages and wears their Santeria necklaces; she is perceived by the effete European Americans around her as "not of this world." Only the priest who has reluctantly accepted the job as her exorcist believes she is neither sick nor possessed but terrified after being inexplicably "interred alive" among the superstitious nuns. Nobel Prize winner Garcia Marquez writes with his usual inventiveness, but over the years his prose style has crystallized and condensed. The result is a tale whose sharp social retort is made all the louder by the luminous, uncluttered telling. Highly recommended.
-?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
-?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Booklist
In a South American seaport town, during the colonial era, when the division between the rich and the poor, the church and the state, and the saint and the demon were absolute, and people strutted and fretted about appropriately, 12-year-old Mari{¡}a de Todos los Angeles, daughter of the marquis de Casalduero and his wife, the flatulent Bernarda Cabrera, meets with the misfortune of being bitten by an ash gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead. When it is learned that the dog is rabid, Mari{¡}a's inevitable destruction begins. Through rumor, superstition, and the ghosts of her family's misbegotten past, it is assumed that Mari{¡}a will have rabies. When the problem comes to the attention of the ultimate authority, the bishop, high-born Mari{¡}a must be handed over to the Church for exorcism, for rabies in this time of love and demons means inevitable possession. Her only hope is Father Cayetano Delaura, her exorcist, a 36-year-old priest with a streak of white hair at his forehead, who falls in love with her before meeting her. Gabriel (One Hundred Years of Solitude) Ma{ }rquez's new fantastic novel is farcical, incredible, malicious, and sadistic. Magical unrealism. A timeless artist, an old master, unraveling the mysteries of life, again. Collette de Sac
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Book Description
From the Nobel Prize-winning author of Love in the Time of Cholera, a startling new novel -- the story of a doomed love affair between an unruly copper-haired girl and the bookish priest sent to oversee her exorcism.
Of Love and Other Demons is set in a South American seaport in the colonial era, a time of viceroys and bishops, enlightened men and Inquisitors, saints and lepers and pirates. Sierva Maria, only child of a decaying noble family, has been raised in the slaves' courtyard of her father's cobwebbed mansion while her mother succumbs to fermented honey and cacao on a faraway plantation. On her twelfth birthday the girl is bitten by a rabid dog, and even as the wound is healing she is made to endure therapies indistinguishable from tortures. Believed, finally, to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, the Bishop's protege, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train; who is already moved by this kicking, spitting, emaciated creature strapped to a stone bed. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels "something immense and irreparable" happening to him. It is love, "the most terrible demon of all." And it is not long before Sierra Maria joins him in his fevered misery.
Unsettling and indelible, Of Love and Other Demons haunts us with its evocation of an exotic world while it treats, majestically the most universal experiences known to woman and man.
Natasha Richardson's film credits include Nell, Widow's Peak, The Comfort of Strangers, and The Handmaid's Tale. She has appeared on stage in Anna Christie, High Society, Hamlet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, among others. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Ingram
Bitten by a rabid dog in colonial South America, twelve-year-old Sierva Mari+a7a is sent to a convent to endure torturous therapies and meets bookish Father Cayetano Delaura, with whom she shares a doomed affair. (General Fiction).
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
About the author
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.
Q>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 Eréndira, 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.
Q>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." --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
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.
Q>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 Eréndira, 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.
Q>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." --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
