LOVE AMONG THE RUINS

By R.Z. Sheppard

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is known as South America's William Faulkner with good reason. Both added new territory to the map of fiction. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha is an imaginary county that contains nearly all one needs to know about the old South, the Lost Cause and the rise of the scalawag class. Garcia's Macondo is a conjured region of Colombia's Caribbean coast that holds the essence of Latin America's ruinous history. The power of these microcosmic worlds brought Nobel Prizes to both men and ensured their subsequent work the utmost attention.

Faulkner endured but did not prevail after Stockholm. Booze and boredom can be cited for his declining powers. Garcia, on the other hand, has gone on to get the most out of his literary property. His epic One Hundred Years of Solitude took more than 20 years to fully develop. Since then, he has spent his energies Macondoizing-turning his broad conception into small, enchanting units. Nearly all the characters of his shorter subsequent books could have been folded into the pages of Solitude.

The newest Maconderos can be found in Of Love and Other Demons (Knopf; 147 pages; $21). Their literary roots are unmistakable. The Marquis de Casalduero is "a funereal, effeminate man, as pale as a lily because the bats drained his blood while he slept." His powerhouse wife Bernarda imports and resells flour and sleeps with the help. Their daughter Maria has rejected her European origins for the Yoruban language and ornaments of her African servants. Added to this New World mix are Abrenuncio, a Portuguese-Jewish physician suspected of necromancy, and Father Cayetano Delaura, a young priest with a thirst for banned books and extraclerical activities.

The novel is continuing proof that Garcia is the master of putting a lot of story into a small space. Spanish austerity, religious authority, classical humanism and African animism compete in a tight setting of cultural decay and utter remoteness. "The city lay submerged in its centuries-long torpor" pretty much sums up the situation. When Mar'a asks Father Cayetano what is on the other side of the ocean, he answers wistfully, "The world."

Not that their own miasmic backwater is uneventful. After Maria is bitten by a dog and begins to act strange, the local bishop suspects demonic possession. Cayetano is sent as an exorcist, but after one look at the girl's blue eyes and cascading copper hair, all that gets exorcised is his own inhibition. A Latin American Abelard and Heloise? Not quite. Garcia tells a story of forbidden love, but he demonstrates once again the vigor of his own passion: the daring and irresistible coupling of history and imagination.