After a brief hiatus, when I resumed reading as regularly as I used to I started with an author I knew would not disappoint me. And he didn’t. “Of love and other demons” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez was um…delightful. (I’m trying to emulate the ‘dazzling’, ‘sublime’, ‘spell binding’ and the like that one gets to see on the covers of novels) The book was most of these, but in moderation.

As always, Marquez does a fabulous job of blending the tangible and the intangible. I’m yet to come across an author (in my limited range of reading) who is riveting despite giving away the end to a story right at the beginning. His stories do not urge you to read on so you know how it ends; it’s more about the journey itself – so you can simultaneously go through what the characters experience as and when they do.

A 12 year-old girl, who has been allowed to grow wild, is bitten by a rabid dog. Her father is unaware of this and it is months before he becomes aware. The sudden realization inspires a love in him for his daughter that he has never felt all his life. In “saving” his daughter, he finds a purpose for his hitherto wasted existence. As the last resort, and after a muddled dream, the agnostic father seeks refuge in the church. The girl is confined in a convent as exorcism is her only hope and a devout exorcist is sent to redeem her. All elements of disaster right there on a platter. The celibate falls in love with the girl and their fates are sealed forever.

The only thing, though, is Marquez doesn’t tell you the story like this. This is what someone reviewing the book can do – show you what the picture looks like. Marquez tells you how to look at it. Even if I wanted to, I would not be able to describe the quirks of his characters. The girl’s hair being pledged till the day of her wedding, the hair growing even after her death, the mother’s cuckoo-ness of rejecting clothes, the father’s love for a madwoman, the madwoman, in reality, being the real mistress of the fated house…… and it goes on. His eccentricity is his strength and, eerily, that is what makes Marquez’s books so believable.

While the book is not on par with his truly superior works like Chronicle of a death foretold and One hundred years of solitude, it definitely is worth a read. And in my case, I perhaps appreciate this one a little more because the last novel of his that I read – Love in the time of cholera – was a bit of a let down after all the hype.

Pick up this book if you are in a mood to let your imagination wild without breaking ties with reality – it has all that you expect from Marquez’s books, but nothing more.