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Product Description
One of the most talented and award-winning writers of his generation, Francisco Goldman’s third novel, The Divine Husband, appeared to wide and rapturous acclaim. Beginning with a single, possibly scandalous love poem by Jose Marti, Cuba’s greatest revolutionary-poet-hero with an infamous secret love life, The Divine Husband is the story of Maria de las Nieves Moran, a former nun forced out of her convent by a revolution in a Central American capital. While making her way in this metropolis nicknamed The Little Paris,” she enrolls in a writing class taught by Jose Marti, under whose spell Maria de las Nieves and her classmates quickly fall. Soon after, Maria de las Nieves flees her home for New York, where Marti has also relocated -- a crucial interval that shaped Marti’s consciousness. Nearly a century later, an elderly woman in Massachusetts hires a college student to investigate her claim that she is the illegitimate offspring of Marti and Maria de las Nieves. Mixing a lovingly re-created historical past with often hilarious, ironic, and moving conjecture that brings to life an unforgettable heroine and her remarkable collection of friends, nemeses, and rival suitors, The Divine Husband is a magnificent American novel.
Amazon.com Review
No reader will come away hungry from the five-course meal of Francisco Goldman's inventive third novel, The Divine Husband. Set in Central America and New York in the late 19th Century, this is the story of Maria de las Nieves Moran, a clever, strong-willed girl of mixed heritage--half Irish-American, half Mayan Indian. In childhood, she and her closest friend, Paquita, discovered the pleasures of making themselves sneeze with fibers of wool extracted from their clothing. When Paquita, at age 12, began to return the attentions of a rapacious Liberal reformer nicknamed El Anticristo, Maria de las Nieves made Paquita swear not to surrender her virginity before she did. Immediately, the scheming Maria de las Nieves announced her vocation, and joined a convent. Goldman's concentrated prose is leavened with eccentric, often brilliant metaphors (the spread of a rumor is described as "a hemispheric cloud of pigeons looking for statues to land on"), calling to mind the great magical realist writers--Grass, Kundera, Garcia Marquez--and ensuring that not a word is wasted on flat exposition. --Regina Marler
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