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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The Literary Equivalent of a Mugging,
By
This review is from: The Divine Husband: A Novel (Paperback)
Wow - what an extremely frustrating novel. On the one hand, for the first three quarters of the book, I thought it was absolutely delightful. Goldman's an excellent writer, is able to evoke the world he's writing about, and mixes both the comic and tragic elements masterfully. And then, about seventy pages before the end, it all goes off the rails.
The mystery which most of the book has been building up to is resolved with an unlikely deus ex machina. The heroine and her supporting cast start acting strange and uncharacteristicly. And the last chapters make an awkward, poorly written shift from the third person point of view to the first. Really, as much as I liked Goldman's first two books, I can't recommend The Divine Husband at all. It should have been longer or it should have been rewritten one more time or whatever. Let's hope the next one is better...
24 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The Divine Bore,
This review is from: The Divine Husband: A Novel (Hardcover)
The historical details in this book are quite interesting. Other than that, the book is excruciatingly dull. Though Maria (the main character) is supposed to be a sort of rebellious femenist character, her actions don't really back up that facade. In addition, it takes so long for the action to develop that even after a hundred pages, I still could find nothing in the book that grabbed me. In general, most of the characters are flat, one-dimetional and rather unlikable. Their motivations are unclear and murky; Maria makes a pact with her friend Paquita that stipulates that Paquita cannot lose her virginity until Maria loses hers, principally because Maria cannot abide Paquita's much older, revolutionary fiance. Maria intends to thwart the union by becoming a nun. Ridiculous? Yes, especially because the religious faith of the girls seems to be quite superficial (and of course, the plan does not work). Although it sounds silly, I really wanted to like this book (...mostly because the quality of the paper is so nice and the cover is quite attractive!)However, for someone who enjoys everything from Krantz to Thackeray to Rushdie, I was quite shocked that there was a dearth of qualities that I could enjoy in this book.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Three and a half stars,
By Mary Sharratt "Author of Daughters of the Wit... (Lancashire, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Divine Husband: A Novel (Paperback)
Francisco Goldman's THE DIVINE HUSBAND is an epic novel set in an unnamed Central American republic in the late 19th century. The protagonist is Maria de las Nieves, a teenaged novice nun forced out of the convent when anti-clerical revolutionaries ban the religious orders. Her subsequent life as a young woman trying to scratch out an independent living as a translator is narrated in part through the point of view of the men who are fascinated with her--until she has a child out of wedlock and refuses to name the father.
Like the previous reviewer, I was thoroughly enchanted with the first three quarters of the book. The writing is absolutely vivid and beautiful, wonderfully researched and full of quirky characters and dashes of magical realism, such a nuns who can bi-locate and be in two places at once. However, after much build up, we finally learn the story of Maria's secret love affair with the young "Mosquito King," and this is the least convincing part of the book. Everything that happens afterward seems clumsy and anti-climactic. The author seems to lose focus at the end of the book, spending more time describing the life of Jose Marti, exiled Cuban poet, than fully developing Maria's story. However, it still gets three and a half stars because the beginning and middle of the book are so strong. -Mary Sharratt, author of The Vanishing Point
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