Word: flor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...proprietress of the Cooking School of Savor and Art, pretty, plump Dona Flor is a well-loved member of the community. She is also pitied because of her impulsive marriage to Vadinho, one of the great gamblers and womanizers in all Brazil. The novel begins at carnival time with Vadinho's sudden death while dancing the samba in drag, "with that exemplary enthusiasm he brought to everything he did except work...
...Dona Flor's friends can scarcely contain their vicarious relief. But Dona Flor is wretched. Her Vadinho was a tender, tireless, imaginative lover...
...moderate in everything, he makes love to his wife on Wednesdays and Saturdays-with an optional encore on Wednesday. She thinks she is content, until she enters her bedroom and finds Vadinho stretched out naked. The next morning he parades unclad about her cooking class-invisible except to Dona Flor but capable of exerting physical pressure on the breasts of an astonished student. Mostly he can be found in her bed, stating with humorous logic his legitimate posthumous rights as a husband...
...course, Vadinho could not make his way back from the blue except in a land as saturated with voodoo and ghostly candomblé rituals as Bahia. "God is fat," he confides to Dona Flor. He came back, he adds, because, despite her love for Dr. Teodoro, she called him. She cannot deny it, nor can she bring herself to send him packing back to his corpulent deity...
...Dona Flor is rich and leisurely, as much verbal aphrodisiac as novel. Flor is a close cousin to Amado's most celebrated heroine. Gabriela (in Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon), another lady capable of cooking up a storm in the kitchen or in bed. In lavishing details of color, touch and taste, Amado so ignores the canons of construction that at times he seems embarked on little more than an engaging shaggy-dog story...