The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini [Paperback]

Stephen Dobyns (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd (1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140235795
• ISBN-13: 978-0140235791
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,077,739 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent and disturbing, July 30, 2000

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Two Deaths of Señora Puccini (Hardcover)

Dobyns is an author I met first as a poet (Cemetery Nights); then I discover he wrote excellent novels and formula mysteries. This book is definately literature not formula mystery.

The story is set in a Latin American city during an uprising. A group of men who've known each other for years meet for a dinner party. The host's relationship with his housekeeper, the Senora Puccini of the title, is dominating and cruel. In the course of the evening his degradation of her becomes more and more cruel as more of the story behind the relationship becomes known - a story of passion, jealousy, love and fidelity. The final revelations are both surprising and believable.

This is an excellent book - a story told so well that you want to read it over and over - a story so disturbing that is forces you to consider man's cruelity to man.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars enthralling, June 10, 2006

By 

Danielle "Danielle" (RI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini (Mass Market Paperback)

For a book that covers the events of one single night (and some of the next day) this book doesn't drag at all. Sometimes when authors try to keep the entirety of a novel to one day or one night, it seems like they take forever at it. This is really a fine story, with great twists.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One Dark Evening....., August 1, 2008

By 

J. R. Hunt (Kalamazoo, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini (Paperback)

This is a very disturbing book, reveiling the darkness, and evil of the human animal. It is tragic in so many ways that one comes away with the feeling that humankind lives in a cesspool of selfishness, with no chance of redemption or any need for it. The world is as it is, violent and ugly. Pacheo, a surgeon and the central character, is as despicable and amoral character as there has ever been, but he bluntly makes no apologies for what he is or what he has done. He is the narcissistic sociopath extraordinaire, and as this book unravels we see that this surgeon, who publicly is respected, is actually very much more sinister. The story is gripping, and reaches a steadily rising crescendo until the last page. A book worth the read, but get ready for a good dose of human ugliness.