The Divine Husband by Francisco Goldman

Review of Francisco Goldman's The Divine Husband

The Divine Husband is written in rhythms that are sweeping and supremely confident. There are long, fluent passages of description that have an almost magical lightness to them. Goldman's method is to heap detail upon detail, allowing minor characters briefly to hold centre stage, offering elaborate background histories, with a strong central story that has public and private implications. In other words, he has taken control of some of the central methods and narrative systems of Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez and other South American and Central American novelists and grafted them on to a supple English prose, used as though it were a luxury of which he is fully in command.(...)

Somehow, in a way that we hardly notice, Goldman manages to weave the strands of geopolitics and sex so that they both seem like chemical properties that make up the air keeping the balloon of history afloat. As his two previous novels show, he has an unusual talent for creating a precise historical moment and, also, a superb sense of character. He is, in other words, a real novelist, and this is his best book so far.

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Guatemalan-American novelist and journalist Francisco Goldman was born in 1955 and was raised in Needham, Mass., and in Guatemala City, Guatemala. His short stories and journalistic pieces have appeared in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. Goldman lives in Mexico City and in New York.