SOURCE: Kerrigan, Michael. “Heretics in Their Dungeons.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4814 (7 July 1995): 23.

In the following review, Kerrigan delineates the major thematic concerns of Of Love and Other Demons.

In the sanctuary of the Bishop's library, a young priest attempts briefly to read, prays for a time with the ardour of desperation, then takes out a valise belonging to a young female charge. Opening it up, he unpacks her personal possessions item by item—touching, smelling, taking possession himself—before recoiling again in horror and flagellating himself with an iron scourge. If, in the wrong hands, love becomes fetishism, so, when faith atrophies, does devotion become relic-worship. Where purity is obsessive, the most natural human feeling seems demonic. The less extravagant the witness, the more marvellous the miracle; it is no coincidence that Gabriel García Márquez, the world's leading chronicler of the magical, should have begun his...