SOURCE: Dinnage, Rosemary. “Melting into Air.” New York Review of Books 43, no. 1 (11 January 1996): 37-9.

In the following excerpt, Dinnage asserts that Of Love and Other Demons is “an ambitious book, different from and darker than anything García Márquez has written before.”

Gabriel García Márquez's Of Love and Other Demons is the opposite of Eco's novel [The Island of the Day Before]: small and spare (some 50,000 words), but glowing with Hispano-American magic that comes partly just from the setting that Márquez made his own in Love in the Time of Cholera: the old town of Cartagena de Indias on the torpid Caribbean coast of Colombia. The time is uncertain—a century later than Eco's tale?—slaves and superstitions, at any rate, are still plentiful, sicknesses are treated with herbs, spells, and invocations. In the harbor float bloated bodies; on a mud beach, children throw...