Of Love and Other Demons Book Club

     Searching through my tubs of books, I came across Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Of Love and Other Demons.  Remembering that I had purchased this short novel years and years ago after a class introduced me to this remarkable Nobel Prize-winning author via One Hundred Years of Solitude, I  knew I had unearthed my next read while feeling a pang of regret at not yet having turned its pages.  Translated by Edith Grossman, Of Love and Other Demons in much the same manner as One Hundred Years of Solitude immerses the reader into the genre of magical realism.
     This style of writing not only entrances me through its melding of fantasy and reality, but also, quite often, causes me to giggle at its absurdity written in such an authoritative manner, "He was an funereal, effeminate man, as pale as a lily because the bats drained his blood while he slept"  (9) . . . "In Burgos he had seen a possessed woman who defecated without pause the entire night until she filled the room to overflowing"  (98).
     For the purposes of book club, the host may prepare a meal of "goat's eyes and testicles cooked in lard and seasoned with burning spices"(65) in order to be true to the female protagonist's likings.  However, cups of chocolate accompanied by bread and cheese may better suit more finicky tastes as it did the Bishop in the novel.  In addition, an assortment of pastries much like those smuggled in for Sierva Maria by Cayetano would be a welcome addition.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez