OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS by...

OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Penguin: $11.95; 147 pp.). The discovery of a mysterious length of red-blond hair in an old cemetery leads the reader into the curious tale of Sierva Maria, the only child of the ineffectual governor of an unidentified Caribbean nation. Sierva Maria embodies the conflict between pagan lust and the formal orthodoxy of 19th century Latin American Catholicism. An asthmatic bishop, an icy prioress and a doubt-plagued Jesuit scholar are among the figures undone by the effort to exorcise the unrepentant Sierva Maria.