DIVA by Daisy Goodwin

A competent fictionalization that breaks no new ground

In Goodwin's competent hands, this fictionalized life of operatic sensation Maria Callas is framed, and punctuated, by her relationship with the richest man on the planet, Ari Onassis. It drops us into her public space and private thoughts on the day she learns Ari has abandoned her and their long-standing affair to marry a woman of better pedigree, namely Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. 

 

After that emotionally tense opening, we skip back-and-forth through her early desperate years in New York City, the ignored younger sister, until she demonstrates her singing talent to her grasping mother. Sent back to Italy when her parents separate, she supports her mother by singing in the streets and bars through some troubled times before finally making her way to a teacher and opera company. When she returns to New York City, it is as a world renowned diva, and the rest of the book is pretty much headlines with some yearning over forbidden food and arrogant comments about her own brilliance.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. But although it gives possible plausible insights into fictionalized Maria, it fails to make her engaging or sympathetic, and does not elevate the rather humdrum elements of her celebrated life either on or off stage. If there was a search for meaning in her life it seems to have gone no further than a quest to be allowed to eat pasta again as opposed to eating only salad to preserve her figure for the stage. With so much rich opera to draw on, there were many parallels that could have been made, some tragedies underpinned by the operas in which she performed, but the book stays in the lighter and easier fare, resulting in an operetta of middling competence rather than an opera-quality life and death.