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The Divine Husband
by Francisco Goldman
Maria is a bookish and dreamy novice nun--until the country's new ruler closes the convents. What will be her fate in the secular world? When she enrolls in a writing class, her life is transformed by a brilliant poet and hero of Cuban independence.
Atlantic Monthly Press, 448 pages
09/09/2004
$24.00
ISBN: 0871139154
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
Historical Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Atlantic Monthly
Goldman not only dramatizes the fate of one lush but unlucky Central American country but also conjures the very spirit of humankind in all its perfidy and splendor. [Aug. 2004, p. 1899]
San Francisco Chronicle Oscar Villalon
It is a sometimes vexing but always lush mix of magical realism and metafiction, that is, by far, the most ambitious work of (North) American fiction published this year.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Beatriz Hausner
The Divine Husband is structurally complex, rich in detail and layering. Goldman is intimately familiar with the physical and psychological environment his characters inhabit. The general feel of the book is that of an enormous animated collage made from sepia portraits of people from another era, as seen through the lens of modern fiction. [30 Oct. 2004, D22]
Daily Telegraph Colm Toibin
Somehow, in a way that we hardly notice, Goldman manages to weave the strands of geopolitics and sex so that they both seem like chemical properties that make up the air keeping the balloon of history afloat. As his two previous novels show, he has an unusual talent for creating a precise historical moment and, also, a superb sense of character. He is, in other words, a real novelist, and this is his best book so far.
The Independent Alberto Manguel
To write such scenes in all their baroque complexity seems impossible. Goldman performs the feat flawlessly.
New York Review Of Books Michael Wood
It patiently creates and recreates people, places, and times, and for all its mockery of history, never wanders far from the plausible record. But Goldman also knows that the imagination offers its own varieties of experience, and he respects the reach of his characters' dreams.
The Guardian Maya Jaggi
Goldman fashions a tenderly intimate and compendious novel from shards of history and poetry, allowing imagination and speculation to flourish in the gaps.
Daily Telegraph Jessica Mann
This North American version of the Latin-American literary manner is a good, though not "the great", American novel, but Goldman is right to predict that "women who read it can live in the book and enjoy it and really get into its emotional life".
The New Yorker
From shards of literary and historical evidence, Goldman's novel re-creates an interlude in the life of Jose Martí, the great Cuban patriot and poet.
Washington Post Michael Dirda
So, take a look at Francisco Goldman's new novel, a serious work by a serious artist. It just might strike you as a masterpiece. But even as I admire the artistry and hard work evidenced in The Divine Husband, I know that admiration is, finally, no substitute for love.
Los Angeles Times Tom Miller
In "The Divine Husband," which in parts reads like a historical essay, contrived events and real people emerge at odd angles, making for occasional frustrating leaps of time. The book has elements of confusion, but it's never dull. Goldman is a maximalist, and his challenging novel of love, migration, class and corruption shows off a gratifying literary dexterity. [12 Sept. 2004, R9]
Chicago Tribune Alan Cheuse
After writing two novels about which I have to confess I find myself feeling rather equivocal, he has taken nearly a decade to come up with his third and certainly his best. "The Divine Husband" embraces great themes, without which, as Melville once wrote, you cannot have a great novel -- in this case, the relation of the individual to history, love and death, language and reality, among other motifs -- and if by the time this new book spins out its full story some of these slip from the writer's arms, we still have to admire what he has attempted to hold together. [5 Sept. 2004, C5]
Flak
Who or what constitutes a divine husband? Within these pages, some find the answer in faith, others in a poet-hero, still others in home and country, or in the embrace of long-sought kinship. Their journeys make for a uniquely ambitious and enlightening read.
Houston Chronicle Lisa Jennifer Selzman
Informative, chatty, wry, often amusing, but not enough so that readers won't be checking their watches. Or calendars.
Publishers Weekly
The novel suffers from too much clutter and the obsession with Marti, a bothersome McGuffin in an otherwise independently interesting story.
The New York Times Book Review Lee Siegel
"The Divine Husband" is a quixotically ambitious poem that has been stretched -- like rubber -- into a novel with an impossible shape.
London Review Of Books John Mullan
All this, inflated by its author’s enthusiasm, might be enough. (Though occasionally the prose, which can’t resist an extra adjective, and is fattened with similes, does seem puffed up.) Yet Goldman’s desire to make a novel of the Americas does not produce especially human characters.
Library Journal Lawrence Olzewski
Though the historical framework is basically sound, Goldman missed a golden opportunity to play up the Marti "man of action" connection, since the legendary Cuban hero appears far too seldom to satisfy the reader's curiosity. Even that probably wouldn't have been enough, however, to save the stilted prose; the narration reads like a stodgy treatise or a digressive journal. [July 2004, p. 70]
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