But Delaura becomes possessed, too-by his love for this suffering child three decades his junior. She is bitten by a rabid dog but shows no real symptoms the local bishop, however, decides she is possessed by demons and orders her incarcerated in a convent where she will be exorcised by his gentle librarian, Father Delaura.

The offspring of a melancholy, ineffectual marquis and a mother yoked to ``insatiable vices,'' Sierva Maria is raised by the family's West Indian slaves, who teach her the Yoruban language and magical practices. As usual, the atmosphere is colored by magical realism: dreams and portents, inexplicable, miraculous events. Remembering his grandmother's tales of a 12-year-old marquise who had died of rabies from a dog bite, Garcia Marquez has imagined the girl's life and the circumstances of her death. When one tomb was opened, ``a stream of living hair the intense color of copper spilled out.'' More than 22 meters in length, it was attached to the skull of a young girl whose body had been interred for 200 years. 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.The incantatory power of Garcia Marquez's prose is as potent as ever in this mesmerizing story inspired by an amazing event he witnessed almost 50 years ago, as a journalist observing the transfer of burial remains from the crypt of an old convent. It is love, 'the most terrible demon of all.' And it is not long before Sierra Maria joins him in his fevered misery. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels 'something immense and irreparable' happening to him. 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. Believed, finally, to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. 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. 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.

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. 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.

Garcia marquez of love and other demons