Summary
After Dona Flor's rakish first husband, whom she passionately loved, dies while dancing the samba in drag at Carnevale, she remarries a more respectable but less exciting pharmacist. Husband #1, however, returns as a ghost who once more makes her happy in bed. This entertaining novel celebrates Brazilian life in all its vigor and sensuality. According to Amado, "It is about how love conquers death."
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Media Reviews
"...[U]nderneath all the fol-de-rols, Amado has a consistent view of life and makes it credible, which is perhaps the most we have a right to task of any writer, anything else he gives us being lagniappe. He is well inside the Latin tradition of taking pleasure, an particularly sensual pleasure, with intense seriousness....The unashamed lyricism of Amado's descriptions of physical pleasure reflects his engaging inverse Puritanism, his sense that hedonism is what makes life worth living..." -- John Wain
-- New York Review of Books
"[R]ich and leisurely, as much verbal aphrodisiac as novel."
-- Time
"Full of witty anecdotes and fascinating digressions on such pleasures as voodoo, gambling and cooking recipes, this long novel...is beguilingly easy to read thanks to its humour and vigour....[A] beautiful novel-a classic of world literature." -- Michael Eaude
-- Times Literary Supplement
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Harpercollins
Published date: 1998
Size: 4.25 x 6.5 inches
Weight: 0.65 pounds
Publisher's Notes
In the midst of carnival, roguish Vadinho dos Guimaraes dies during a parade, leaving behind his long-suffering wife, Dona Flor, a cooking instructor. As a widow, Flor devotes herself to cooking school and an assortment of well-meaning friends who urge her to remarry. She finds herself attracted to Dr. Teodoro Madureria, a kind, considerate pharmacist, who is everything Vadinho was not. After her marriage, though content, Flor longs for her first husband's sensual pleasures. And her desirous longing is so powerful that it brings the ghost of Vadinho back from the grave--right into her bed.
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