The Divine Husband

by Francisco Goldman
Fiction. Atlantic Monthly Press.
Publication: September 2004.
448 pp.
World rights: Grove / Atlantic, Inc.

Rights sold:
Editions d’Olivier (France),
Il Saggiatore (Italy),
Atlantic Books (UK),
Anagrama (Spain).


Book Description:
With his previous novels, Francisco Goldman has reaped immense acclaim and established himself as an American voice of vital importance. His third novel is a marvelous tale of great love, the soul of the Americas and the birth of the modern spirit, set in the convents, ballrooms, and coffee plantations of late-nineteenth-century Central America and the docks, rooming houses, and stately Fifth Avenue addresses of New York. When we meet María de las Nieves Moran, she 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 María de las Nieves enrolls in a writing class under José Martí, her life is transformed by the brilliant poet and hero of Cuban independence, whose year in that Central American capital results in Latin America’s most famous love poem. María de las Nieves’s story unfolds among an unforgettable cast of characters striving for love or success. And when María de las Nieves departs for New York years later, young daughter in tow, she continues to evade the mystery of who, of her many suitors, is the girl’s father, and what really happened between her and José Martí.


Francisco Goldman’s first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens, was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for first fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Ordinary Seaman, his second novel, was a finalist for the International IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction. Both of his novels were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award and have been translated into nine languages. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fellow at the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers, and he is currently Allan K. Smith Professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His fiction and journalism have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Esquire, The New York Review of Books, Outside, and many other publications. He lives in New York City and Mexico City.


Praise and Reviews:

“Goldman echoes Flaubert, García Marquez, and even DeLillo . . . but he remains his own literary master, and in this book succeeds in making the novel new. He has produced a work of ambition, seriousness, passion and seething life. The Divine Husband confirms Goldman as one of America’s most significant living novelists, a voice of audacity and gravitas that serves as inspiration to writers and readers alike.” —Claire Messud, Bookforum

“Deep imagination, stylistic verve, and psychological acuity . . . A novel packed with incidents and coincidence, a tour de force of temporal hide-and-seek. . . . A serious work by a serious artist. It just might strike you as a masterpiece.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

"Hilarious, tender, magnificent." -Susan Choi, The Believer

“A rich and sensuous new novel. Taking as its starting point a mysterious poem by one of Latin America’s greatest men of letters and of action, Goldman creates a fascinating adventure story. At its center is not the historic José Martí—the author of the poem—but the enchanting, eccentric, intellectually ambitious and fiercely independent muse Goldman has invented for him, María de las Nieves. Her entrapment in a pretentious backwater society, her tentative, often disastrous romances, her dialogues with a supporting cast of improbable characters who are nevertheless completely believable, are all told sympathetically, delicately, carefully. The result is an engrossing and entertaining book, meticulously imagined, beautifully told.” —Alma Guillermoprieto

“Love in all its forms permeates the pages of Goldman’s long-awaited third novel. . . . Goldman helps us through by punctuating each page with a moment of lyricism potent enough to make you pause, put down the book and then read the passage again. Brave and bighearted . . . this novel reminds us what it feels like to experience love for the first time.” —John Freeman, Time Out New York

“A shape-shifting novel . . . blending the invented and the factual . . . Goldman . . . tells his story with sensuous imagery worthy of John Keats—some of it mystical, some of it erotic, and much of it funny.” —Diane Scharper, Denver Post

“The Divine Husband presents the peculiar crossroads where love and imagination meet politics and history. . . . [Its] stories . . . pour out of a sly, tender imagination. Tales within tales, they are lushly written, vibrant with lovely descriptions of seascape and landscape. . . . A great miscegenating carnival of ambition and desire.” —Lee Siegel, The New York Times Book Review

“From shards of literary and historical evidence, Goldman’s novel re-creates an interlude in the life of José Martí, the great Cuban patriot and poet. In 1877, the young Martí, exiled from Cuba for anti-Spanish activities, grew curious about the recent liberal revolution in Guatemala and took a job teaching at a women’s college there. In many ways, the novel is built around Martí’s 1891 collection Versos Sencillos, one poem of which has led scholars to speculate that Martí fathered an illegitimate child in Guatemala. Goldman’s Martí is indeed wildly popular with his female students, one of whom, a former novice in a convent abolished by the liberals, is able, through prayer and intense meditation, to transport herself from one place to another—an ability that provides an apt metaphor for Goldman’s sense of both a country at a cultural crossroads and an exotic lost world.” —The New Yorker

“Goldman will cast . . . [a] formidable shadow, judging by the breadth, scope, and lyrical orchestration of his fantastic new novel. . . . The Divine Husband tells a soulful story about love-from the religious to the romantic. . . . Nearly every page has a moment of lyricism so neatly put it makes you pause and read the passage again. . . . A brave and big-hearted book.” —John Freeman, Orlando Sentinel

“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. . . . Everything he does with [the] historical character [José Martí] feels exactly right. . . . At wonderful moments . . . Goldman’s book demonstrates that the dream of the Great American Novel is still alive.” —Alan Cheuse, The Chicago Tribune

“A level of writing, very rare, that takes your breath away. The language sets off a series of recognitions, things you have experienced or intuited but have not captured in words. . . . Love is the touchstone of Goldman’s hefty, sagacious third novel . . . love religious and secular, of poetry, of nation. The Divine Husband is an alchemist’s brew of history, fiction and legend. . . . A uniquely ambitious and enlightening read.” —Lisa Jennifer Selzman, The Houston Chronicle

“An intricately wrought tale, a book that takes all kinds of risks with storytelling.” —Beth Kephart, The Baltimore Sun

“Ambitious, rich in period detail, animated by dramatic events and colorful characters. It ably links past and present, underscores the ambiguous connections between fact and legend, imagines the destinies of Central America and the Colossus of the North as inextricably entwined. . . . There is very little that Goldman’s sprightly writing cannot bring to life. He makes us feel a nun’s zealotry, a politician’s ambition, a girl’s jealousy.” —Dan Cryer, Newsday

“[An] extraordinary beautiful new novel.” —Esther Allen, Bomb

“A classic Latin American novel, written in English . . . Goldman is a maximalist, and his challenging novel of love, migration, class, and corruption shows off a gratifying literary dexterity.” —Tom Miller, The Los Angeles Times

“Ebullient, mischievous, and sensual . . . A multifaceted, brilliantly satirical tale populated by compelling and diverse characters, and laced with piquant riffs. . . . Ultimately, 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.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist


Amazon.com
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

From Booklist
Goldman, a highly artistic writer of conscience, delves more deeply into the injustices and paradoxes of Central American society with each book, creating, in his third novel, a dynamically episodic saga written in a more ebullient, mischievous, and sensual mode than before but without belying complexity or tragedy. Two friends serve as polestars: Francisca "Paquita" Aparicio, lovely and privileged, and Maria de las Nieves Moran, a smart, tough, and multilingual mestiza. They’re sequestered in a convent (prompting thorny musings on tyranny and mysticism) to protect Paquita from her much older admirer, a revolutionary called El Anticristo, but once he’s in power, Paquita becomes a willing first lady. Maria de las Nieves becomes a translator, which prompts a provocative inquiry into language and conquest, interpretation and dominion, and she falls in love with Jose Marti, the nineteenth-century writer and martyred leader of the Cuban struggle for independence. These volatile circumstances serve as catalysts for a multifaceted, brilliantly satirical tale populated by compelling and diverse characters, and laced with piquant riffs on everything from miscegenation to hot-air balloons. Ultimately, 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. Donna Seaman
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