Bitten by Passion : Marquez on demon possession of several kinds : OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS, <i> By Gabriel Garcia Marquez</i> . <i> Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Alfred A. Knopf: $21; 147 pp.)</i>

In a port on the Caribbean, a colonial aristocrat dozes in a hammock outside his mansion while bats gradually drain his blood. Indoors, his wife lives in a haze of stench on a daily regimen of three antimony purges and six enemas. A pack of rabid monkeys invades a Mass at the cathedral. A beautiful Abyssinian slave, 6 feet, 7 inches tall and with perfect teeth, is auctioned off for her weight in gold. The remains of a girl, dead for 200 years, are disinterred; her coppery hair has grown to be 73 feet long.

The publishers hardly needed to put Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s name on the title page of “Of Love and Other Demons.” (The name of his excellent translator, Edith Grossman, is required or we might believe that we were reading effortlessly in Spanish.) Where else could we be but in the Colombian’s imaginary hotlands, where space is curved and time can’t negotiate the bends? “How slow life is,” the aristocrat exclaims when he hears that his daughter is 12.

Garcia Marquez’s novel--more like a novella in length--is set off, he tells us in a prelude, by an incident that took place in 1947 when he was a young reporter. The crypt of a convent was being emptied to make way for a hotel; in one of the niches the bones of a girl were found, with a prodigious length of her hair still intact.

Whether fictional or not--can old story-tellers know the difference?--the prelude leads into a series of Marquezian adornments on a plot reminiscent of 19th-Century melodrama. Sierva, the 12-year-old daughter of the Marquis of Casalduero, is suspected of demonic possession and ordered by the local bishop into a convent for examination and exorcism. Her examiner is Cayetano, a brilliant and zealous young priest. He is smitten by the girl with the endless train of copper hair.

His admonishments turn to ardor and smuggled-in pastries. Flame and fuel, combined, ignite a mutual passion. He is removed and sent to work in a leper hospital; she, deprived of her lover, and rigorously immured, reproduces all the howlings and violence of a veritable indwelling demon--hence the book’s title. Interrogated more and more harshly, she gives up and dies.

The story is not the main thing but it is more than a pretext. As with Garcia Marquez’s other works--this is a good one though not quite among his best--it is there to furnish the feverish element that the author requires for his transformations. He produces a passion and then subverts it with tropical irony; the kind of irony we see when some exemplar of Western pride--a mansion, a shiny automobile, a political constitution--is subverted respectively by creeping lianas, battery fungus and military pronunciamientos.

Subversion provides the magical part of Garcia Marquez’s magic-realism; and it usually stands for improvement. For example, the examining of Sierva involves, at one point, the advice of a former inquisitor. Back in Seville he shone for his ability to light up heretics. Here, retired to work as a priest in the black slums, he speaks to Sierva in Yoruba. Her peculiar father and mother had her live in the slave quarters, and to her, African means home. The old inquisitor has decayed tropically into kindness, and he was about to get her released when he is found, mysteriously drowned, in a well.

The story begins with a mad dog running through the port. Among those he bites is Sierva, walking with her maid in the market. It briefly moves her father, the Marquis, out of his hammock-bound torpor. He consults his friend, Abrenuncio, a Portuguese Jew who is a physician, a scholar and a free-thinker with a dossier in the Holy Office; and genially open-minded. A 17th-Century man of the left, in other words, and no doubt the author’s alter ego. Here he is, expatiating on horses--his own has just died--after the Marquis confesses he is afraid of them:

“That is too bad because lack of communication with horses has impeded human progress. If we ever broke down the barriers we could produce centaurs.”

Abrenuncio, who treats his own patients by playing the harp, examines the bite on Sierva’s ankle and opines that she may not get rabies, but that if she does, there is nothing to be done. Meanwhile, her father should keep her happy. Unfortunately, other doctors are called, and their treatments are so painful and barbaric that the girl--wild by nature and by odd upbringing--soon reproduces all the rabid symptoms. Her howling and ferocity, reported to the bishop, lead him to suspect demonic possession. It is the book’s recurring irony: Sierva’s outbreaks, natural responses to real abuses, are disastrously misinterpreted by the avatars of science and religion.

The hint of social commentary is amplified in the story of the Marquis and his wife, Bernarda. He is the timid, lethargic son of a villain who made his fortune dealing in slaves and smuggling flour. The son briefly loves a madwoman who sends him messages in flights of paper birds. To get him away, his father exiles him to one of his plantations. It is a failure; one night, the cattle, pigs and chickens decamp in a procession.

After marrying a musician, who is killed by lightning on a cloudless day, before she can persuade him to consummate the marriage, the Marquis is claimed by Bernarda. She brings him presents, and rapes him in his hammock. It is a set-up; her father promptly offers him an arquebus “in the event Your Excellency wishes to do me the honor of killing me before I kill you.”

The marriage is arranged; the rapacious Bernarda recoups the family fortunes by going back into slaves and flour. Drugs and lust--she buys a series of lovers--undo her. She, with her baths and enemas and her husband, in his hammock, live at silent opposite ends of a cold house; while Sierva learns heat and hatred in the slave quarters.

“Of Love and Other Demons” is a work of considerable beguilement and edge. The open-minded Abrenuncio, the passionate and mysterious Sierva and even the languidly ruined Marquis are all intriguing figures. By contrast, Bernarda is too single-mindedly evil to be more than grotesque, and Cayetano, the priest turned lover, is pallid.

More seriously, the characters and the story lack the desperate momentum, underlying their comic extravagance, that makes such long works as “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, and the novella “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” so memorable. Some of the magical ironies are as fresh as ever; others display more magician than magic. Garcia Marquez retains a vital and remarkable voice, and the pen of an angel; but there are signs here and there of an art aging, a stiffening of qualities into mannerisms.