The Divine Husband

by Francisco Goldman (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $3.47

  Francisco Goldman, one of the most talented and award-winning writers of his generation, released his third novel, The Divine Husband, to wide and rapturous acclaim. Beginning with a single, possibly scandalous love poem by Jose Marti, Cuba's greatest revolutionary-poet-hero with an infamous secret love life, The Divine Husband is the story of Maria de las Nieves Moran, a former nun forced out of her convent by a revolution in a Central American capital.

  While making her way in this metropolis nicknamed The Little Paris, she enrolls in a writing class taught by Jose Marti, under whose spell Maria de las Nieves and her classmates quickly fall. Soon after, Maria de las Nieves flees her home for New York, where Marti has also relocated?a crucial interval that shaped Marti's consciousness. Nearly a century later, an elderly woman in Massachusetts hires a college student to investigate her claim that she is the illegitimate offspring of Marti and Maria de las Nieves.

  Mixing a lovingly re-created historical past with often hilarious, ironic, and moving conjecture that brings to life an unforgettable heroine and her remarkable collection of friends, nemeses, and rival suitors, The Divine Husband is a magnificent American novel.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $7.17

  The Divine Husband follows Maria de las Nieves Moran on her journey from closeted girlhood in a riotous convent to social, sexual and intellectual emancipation in the giddy city of New York. Her life is told through a series of unforgettable characters who strive, just as she does, for love and success in late-nineteenth century America, both North and South: Jose Marti, poet and hero of Cuban independence; Mack Chinchilla, entrepreneur and idealist; and a stifled English Diplomat all become enthralled by the charismatic Maria, and, perhaps, conspire in her downfall as she gives birth to a daughter that one of them may have fathered. This is a novel of great beauty and wisdom, filled with disarming Indian girls, wandering Jewish coffee farmers, eccentric shaman priests, and the founder of the rubber-balloon industry - a nocturnal prophylactic producer. Francisco Goldman has written a novel of great humanity and heart that will be a literary event.