Of Love and Other Demons

Del amor y otros demonios, 1994, translated by Edith Grossman in 1995. In an eighteenth-century Caribbean colonial city, a twelve-year-old girl is bitten by a rabid dog, never develops symptoms, and is handed to a convent to be exorcised anyway; the priest assigned to her falls in love with her instead. The short, cold engine of the book is institutional certainty — the machinery is confident it is treating a demon, and the treatment is what destroys her.

Context: the Fantasy section of the a16z list, the last of the five García Márquez titles it names, and the latest of them. The section is the team’s own caveat — they say they are not fantasy people and are asking for pull requests to fill it in.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• Gabriel García Márquez — the author.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude — the first of his titles on the list, already carded.
• Religion — the institution the book is about.
• Literature — where this sits in the corpus.