Sierva Maria is bitten on the ankle by a rabid dog on her 12th birthday. Nothing seems to come of it for months, until she begins convulsing on the floor one day. Her parents, who have ignored her for her entire life, become convinced she's possessed and take her to an abbey, where she's locked up. The priest meant to perform an exorcism instead falls in love with her, and ultimately ruins his life, while failing to save hers.
Most of the (white) adults in the book fail to understand Sierva. Her parents ignored her to wallow in their own problems, and she was raised by the slaves on the property in their cultures. So they understand her quite well. Unfortunately for Sierva, they aren't the ones in control of the situation, and the people who are just want her to be quiet and docile and conform to their expectations. When that fails to happen, she's possessed. I know, hard to believe the Catholic Church would react to a woman showing independence or defiance with accusations that she's a servant of Satan. Quite possibly the least surprising development in a story in human history.
I haven't read anything of Marquez' since I finished Love in the Time of Cholera 5 years ago, but I remember his work fondly enough that I was looking forward to the times when he goes into detail on a character's backstory. With a lot of other writers, this annoys me, especially if they do so late in the book when I'm eager to find out how it ends. But Marquez has a knack for making it not feel like an unnecessary diversion. It always seems relevant to what's happening in that it usually explains something important about the character. Even if the backstory he's describing isn't anything fanciful or exciting, he writes in a way that it's still interesting. He can write about someone having lived a boring, timid life, and make it the most fascinating couple of pages. Leave you wondering how this person could have lived such a dull life.
He's excellent at giving you a couple of sentences of description of a setting or how a person looks, but leaving enough space you can fill it in with your imagination, which I really appreciate. You can tell enough from what he writes to understand the feeling he's going for, and then you can picture what best conveys that for you.
After the immense disappointment I found Gravity's Rainbow, this was a nice bounce back. It's witty when it needs to be, the characters are distinct and memorable, the specifics of how things play out are a surprise but fit with the overall story.
'A frequent request was that she serve as their intermediary with the devil to ask for impossible favors. Sierva Maria would imitate voices from beyond the grave, voices of those who had been decapitated, voices of the spawn of Satan, and many believed her sly deceptions and attested to their truth in the acta. A band of nuns in disguise attacked the cell one evil night, gagged Sierva Maria, and stripped her of the sacred necklaces. It was an ephemeral victory. As they hurried away, the commander of the raiding party stumbled and fell on the dark stairs and fractured her skull. Her companions did not have a moment's peace until they returned the stolen necklaces to their owner. No one disturbed the nights in her cell again.'
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