Book Review: Diva

Diva by Daisy Goodwin (St. Martin’s Press, 2023).

The 1953 recording of Tosca with Maria Callas once made me cry so hard, I almost had to pull off the road.

This is the kind of thing that’s good to know as you start to read Diva, Daisy Goodwin’s new novel about the legendary soprano. This was the colossal gift that Callas possessed: a voice and an acting ability so powerful that she didn’t just play a character, she inhabited it to the full. Her Tosca on that old recording reached out across the decades and grabbed me by the throat. There have been few, before or since, who could do anything like what she did.

Diva shows us something of the high price Callas paid for that gift. Goodwin shows her to us at the peak of her career, exercising iron self-discipline over her singing practice, her diet, her rest, and every other detail of her regimen. Even her marriage revolves around her singing, as she’s married to her manager, Tita Meneghini, who values her voice above everything else about her.

This compelling and sympathetic portrayal of Maria Callas shows just how seriously she took her singing, and how willing she was to make the punishing sacrifices it required. Not that she doesn’t succumb to temptation now and then, but there’s always a cost—one late night at a New Year’s Eve party leads directly to illness and a subpar performance the next day.

But having to exercise all this restraint has costs of its own. It makes her dangerously vulnerable when the ultimate temptation shows up, in the form of wealthy Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. Starved for romance, Maria lets herself be drawn to him … but Onassis has no intention of being tamed like a moody billionaire in a romance novel. After he sets his eyes on an even bigger prize than the world’s greatest diva, it will take all Maria’s considerable strength to pick up the pieces of her life and career.

Author Daisy Goodwin (perhaps best known as the creator of PBS’s “Victoria'“) deftly handles the various threads of Callas’s story, interspersing flashbacks to her troubled childhood; interweaving her love for her work with her longing for a stable family life; and showing how, in spite of all those who wanted to use, exploit, or control her, she kept a firm hand on the reins of her own career. As portrayed here, she’s confident without arrogance, passionate yet guarded, fully aware of the magnitude of the gift she’s been given, and just as aware that, without her own careful management, it could desert her.

For all the glamour of a great singer’s life—and Callas had more than most—it’s also a life of drudgery. It can’t be easy to capture that daily grind in a way that makes it just as interesting as the glamorous side, but Goodwin does an excellent job of it. Of course, she did have plenty of help from her subject. As one devoted fan observes in this story, wherever Callas went, there was drama.

Diva releases on January 23; you can pre-order it at the links below.

(Cover image copyright St. Martin’s Press. Thanks to NetGalley for the advance review copy.)

Book Links:

Diva on Amazon
Diva on Bookshop

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At Dickensblog, I reviewed The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens by Helena Kelly.