SOURCE: Bemrose, John. “Rabid Religion.” Maclean's 108, no. 30 (24 July 1995): 50.

In the following review, Bemrose criticizes Of Love and Other Demons, faulting García Márquez's prose as overwrought and rigid.

Long before he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude and won the 1982 Nobel Prize for literature, Gabriel García Márquez worked as a newspaper reporter in his native Colombia. One autumn day in 1949, his editor at the Bogotá daily asked the 21-year-old journalist to investigate the demolition of an old convent. Márquez watched as workmen broke into the adjacent tombs—and uncovered a flow of coppery red hair which he says was over 22 metres long. It was attached to the skull of a girl, Sierva María de Todos Los Angeles. The discovery led Márquez to recall a legend his grandmother had told him, about a 12-year-old Colombian saint with fantastically long hair who had died...