Customer Reviews

The Divine Husband: A Novel

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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...

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.

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

This book and francisco Goldman are highly regarded. He uses magic realism to trace history intertwined with two girls lives. It does not work for me as it seems only an aaccumulation of details and pontification.

Our book club was canceled because no one could finish the book. I got to chapter three and gave up.

I've made it to page 46 and that's it. I just can't justify spending any more time with this detail heavy tale.

I began reading the reviews of this book when I was about a third of the way through. I thought, Uh-oh, better lower my expectations. I'm now 100 pages from the end. I have to say: I love this book. It is amazing, riveting, FUNNY. I suppose the fact that the mythical country Goldman describes reminds me so much of my home country, the Philippines, is a big point in its favor. But I've found myself wanting to read whole sections aloud to my husband, to anyone who will listen. The characters: the nun who induces sneezing fits as her little act of rebellion against the almost total lack of privacy; the famous poet Jose Marti and the women who sign up for his classes so they can swoon at his feet; the feckless rulers -- what a rich canvas he draws. I've loved every page (that I've read).

Francisco Goldman's "The Divine Husband" or "El Esposo Divino" the Spanish translation somebody gave me to read is a well written fiction novel. I would give it an eight on a scale of one to ten, since what I read is its translation to Spanish and I cannot judge it by his English writing. It is an excellent novel if you ignore the erroneous history facts about Guatemala and José Martí the Cuban Independence apostle.
I call it a fiction novel even though he tries to involve in it the Cuban poet José Martí and Francisca Aparicio, the wife of the Reformer President of Guatemala Justo Rufino Barrios. Goldman, as a true "gringo", did not research the contributions Justo Rufino Barrios made to his country and called him the "anti-Christ", "anti-cristo", because it is true he got the orders of nuns out of Guatemala, confiscated church property, reduced the number of clergy in the country and some conservative catholic people might give him that name.
Justo Rufino Barrios introduced the first Constitution to the Country, since previous presidents governed by decree only. His government introduces the freedom of speech and religious freedom when previous governments did not tolerate a non-catholic religion. He welcomed Protestant missionaries, established civil marriage and divorce. He initiated the secular public schools and Universities and that was the reason José Martí came to Guatemala and worked as a teacher in the schools and National University before going back to Cuba to give his life for the independence of his country. His government also organized the police and got a policeman from New York to lead the effort. His government sent people to the United States to learn about the mail system and the telegraph. His government introduced the telegraph system and the railroad. In sum, Justo Rufino Barrios deserved the name of "The Reformer" rather than the "anti-Christ". Justo Rufino also encouraged the European immigration to Guatemala that brought many Germans, who industrialized the coffee farms and Italians to work in the railroads.
And his fictional characters of Maria de las Nieves and Marco Aurelio Chinchilla. Mr.Goldman as a good "gringo" assumes that if the name of the person is also the name given to an animal, that person has to be of indigenous origen, notwithstanding if the name was given to the animal by his discoverer's name. There have been only two persons with the name of Marco Aurelio Chinchilla and they were from a century later. One was born in 1908 and the other in 1934, none of them Indians. The Spanish families and families around the world by that last name now must know they are of indigenous background according to Mr. Goldman. Mr. Goldman should have researched the Mayan names in Guatemala before taking the names of real people to include them in his novel. The Spanish families with the Chinchilla last name, according to Goldman, must be of Guatemalan indigenous decent, such as Spaniard Captain Vicente Chinchilla who arrived in Guatemala in 1761. The only Marco Aurelio in Justo Rufino Barrios time was Marco Aurelio Soto then Secretary of Education who gave the position to José Martí as a teacher.
Mr. Goldman, in his well rounded imagination, reduces José Martí to a teen-age seducer without taking in account Martí's fervor for the independence of Cuba from Spain and any other Empire trying to subjugate his country. He gets involved the Pinkerton investigators to report on Martí's sexual life as if the Spanish government were interested on it rather than his independentist activities.
Mr.Goldman has an excellent imagination and he deserves admiration for it but, when writing a fictionalized novel with historical facts, one has to make be truthful to history and not distort such facts. There are rumors of an emotional relationship between Martí and Maria García Granados. Rumors from the poem Martí wrote about her death. No other letter or document confirms any relationship among them. The only witness to such affair is Maria de las Nieves, a fictional character in Goldman's story.
The German immigration brought to Guatemala many Hebrews (Jews), later during the WWII many were interned, with the rest of the Germans, in concentration camps in Texas and their land confiscated. At the end of the war they never came back to Guatemala.

Worth wait 30 years for this one! Well done "Paquito"! Well documented. Many new unanswered questions...