Úsměvné a lehce satirické vyprávění o intimním manželském životě půvabné učitelky kuchařského umění s jejími dvěma partnery, z nichž první je roztomilý flákač a hráč rulety, zatímco druhý je úctyhodným lékárníkem.

Doña Flor, directora de una prestigiosa escuela de cocina de Bahía, se ha casado dos veces. La primera con Vadinho, un juerguista impenitente, conocido en todos los bares y burdeles de la ciudad y excepcional e insaciable amante. Cuando muere, a causa de sus excesos, su esposa vuelve a casarse.

Pero Teodoro, su segundo marido, es todo lo contrario. Se trata de un farmacéutico cuarentón, rígido y pudoroso, que lleva una vida impecable. Pero, al año de esta segunda boda y para susto de doña Flor, el travieso espíritu del encantador Vadinho reaparece con la misma fogosidad sexual de antaño.

La dama se verá ante la disyuntiva de elegir entre rechazar los impetuosos apetitos de su primer marido y mantenerse fiel al segundo o aceptarlos ya que, al fin y al cabo, él también es su esposo. Así, optará por la segunda opción que le proporciona la formalidad de Teodoro y el goce de Vadinho.

En la novela hay otro rasgo muy destacable y siempre presente en la obra de Amado: las artes culinarias y el goce para los sentidos que ellas suponen, siempre en estrecha relación con el erotismo y la mitología local. En suma, una hermosa novela costumbrista pero cargada de ironía, lirismo, algo de sátira social y un verdadero derroche de sensualidad. ( )

Inmenso retablo de las maravillas, homenaje a la vida y canto de libertad, DOÑA FLOR Y SUS DOS MARIDOS gira en torno al conflicto al que se ve enfrentada la protagonista cuando, viuda y casada en segundas nupcias con el pudoroso y circunspecto Teodoro, se ve requerida nuevamente desde el más allá por Vadinho, su anterior marido, holgazán, juerguista, enredador y fogoso amante. Contra un fondo sensual y colorido en el que lo maravilloso y lo cotidiano interactúan con toda naturalidad, el popular escritor brasileño Jorge Amado plasma en esta novela inolvidable y en su pintoresca galería de personajes todo el sabor, el humor y el encanto de la vida bahiana.

In Dona Flor, Jorge Amado creates a character that defines the tension between spirit and matter; proud of her tact and meekness, but nursing a hidden flame. The reader explores both the wealthy and uptight class and the gambling, fun-loving lower classes of Bahia, Brazil. Vadinho, her first husband, is an inveterate gambler, womanizer, and drunk who loves Dona Flor honestly but imperfectly. He drops dead in the first chapter, and Flor is plunged into widowhood. Her second husband is an upright and honest man who also adores Flor, but is, quite simply, boring as hell.

The reader meets inhabitants of the underbelly, and the cream of the crop as well, in an unstoppable parade of characters that situate her firmly in Amado's world. The shallow henpecking of the wealthy, their endless formalities and judgments, speaks to the author's love of the working class, whom we meet as a partying rabble of free thinkers and lovers.

Amado uses Vadinho's return from the dead to explore what happens to people when they are split inside, how it is possible to love two people at once (easier when one of them is dead), how to rectify differences between matter and spirit. Told with good humor, an empathetic understanding of why people act the way they do toward one another, and a wonderful sense of raunchy goodness, the book makes a defense for love without excuses or shame. ( )

For the first 500 pages or so, this pretends to be a straightforward pastiche of an old-fashioned social-realist novel, the sort of thing Balzac would undoubtedly have written, had he been a hundred years younger and living in Bahia. It's all about the flimsiness of the veneer of respectability that (notionally) separates the ambitious, modern, bourgeois, Catholic residents of Salvador de Bahia from the colourful world of gambling, vice, and traditional religion that surrounds them.

Dona Flor is a respectable, self-made woman, proprietor of a celebrated cookery school for the daughters of the rich, but her first husband, Vadinho, is an irresponsible gambler and a party-animal who can't give her anything but love. When he meets his untimely end whilst dancing in drag at the carnival, Flor follows the advice of her friends and — after the required decent interval — takes the considerate, methodical and ever-so-slightly-boring pharmacist and amateur bassoonist Teodoro as her second husband. Naturally, she still has occasional pangs for her nights of passion with the late Vadinho, and Amado takes shameless advantage of her weakness to play a Latin-American novelist's trump card in the last 150 pages, producing much very entertaining chaos in the process.

This is the sort of book where you feel you must be missing out on a lot of in-jokes at the expense of Amado's friends and neighbours, but it also sneaks in quite a lot of detailed social analysis of provincial Brazil in the mid-20th century and the changes it was going through. Flor and her friends are women who have been brought up with a very narrow idea of their role in the world, but many of them have found more or less subtle ways to challenge that. ( )