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

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is up to his old tricks. Del amor y otros demonios may not be in the same league as One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it is still an engrossing page-turner filled with magic, humor, political insight, shrewd social commentary, and characters who are both lovable and thoroughly aggravating. It is also proof that Latin America's Nobel Prize-winning novelist is still in excellent form.

Set in colonial Colombia and narrated in Garcia Marquez's usual deadpan, the story revolves around twelve-year-old Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles, only child of the Marquis of Casalduero and his degenerate commoner wife. Wandering through the port area with a mulatto servant, the girl is bitten on the ankle by a rabid dog. The servant attaches minimal importance to the injury and so fails to report it immediately to the mother, who is too preoccupied with her own bodily functions to care much about the child anyway, or to the father, who wanders around in a perpetual daze. A squalid, rachitic pre-adolescent, Sierva Maria feels far more at home with the black slaves who raised her than with her decadent parents. Covered with beads, her face painted black, she dances with abandon at the servants' get-togethers. She speaks African languages and knows more about Yoruba rites than Catholicism. However, when an Indian named Sagunta informs the marquis that his daughter has been bitten by a rabid dog, he orders her out of the slave quarters and into the manor house.

Until now indifferent to his daughter, the marquis suddenly becomes obsessed with her. Even though Sierva shows no signs of disease, he consults every authority he can think of, including the nonconformist, Latin-speaking, Portuguese-Jewish doctor, Abrenuncio de Sa Pereira Cao (whose first name means I renounce and last surname, dog). Although Abrenuncio assures the marquis that Sierva's chances of contracting rabies are minimal and advises him to wait and see, the marquis cannot. The bishop, don Toribio y Caceres y Virtudes, convinces him that the child is possessed and arranges to have her confined to the dreadful Convent of Santa Clara.

Sierva Maria rebels. She engages in bizarre behavior, remaining silent or speaking in African tongues, all of which the nuns interpret as evidence...