Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands

"In this second marriage there was no wooing, and this was as it should be, for it does not look right for a widow to be lovemaking in a corner or the doorway, cuddling, hugging, kissing, embracing, touching here, touching there, hand on breasts, slipping down to thigh."

"Poetic, comic, human" is how The Washington Post hailed Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, the international classic by Jorge Amado, Brazil's foremost novelist. This captivating fable celebrates heated passions, conjugal harmony, the rhythms of the samba, and the delectable joys of cooking.

Caught up in the pandemonium of carnival, the roguish and irresponsible Vadinho dos Guimaraes dies during a parade, leaving behind his long suffering wife, the irrepressible Dona Flor. As a widow, Flor devotes herself to her cooking school and an assortment of interfering but well-meaning friends who urge her to remarry. The lonely widow finds herself attracted to Dr. Teodoro Madureria, a kind, considerate pharmacist, who is everything the reckless Vadinho was not. Yet after their marriage, though content, Flor longs for her first husband's amorous, and exhausting, sensual pleasures. And Flor's desirous longing is so powerful that it brings the ghost of Vadinho back from the grave--right into her bed.

Jorge Amado was born in 1912 in llhÉus, the provincial capital of the state of Bahia, whose society he portrays in such acclaimed novels as Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon; Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands; and Tereza Batista: Home from the Wars. His father was a cocoa planter, and his first novel, Cacau, published when he was nineteen, is a plea for social justice for the workers on the cocoa estates south of Bahia. The theme of class struggle continued to dominate in his novels of the 1930s and '40s, but with the 1950s and Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon(1958), the political emphasis gave way to a lighter, more novelistic approach. It was in that novel, published in the United States when Amado was fifty and enthusiastically received in some fourteen countries, that he first explored the rich literary vein pursued in Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. A highly successful film version of Dona Flor was produced in Brazil in 1976.