The Divine Husband: A Novel

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