Critical Evaluation
A native New Yorker of Cuban parentage, Oscar Hijuelos graduated from the City College of New York. His first novel, Our House in the Last World, was published in 1983. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, winner of a 1990 Pulitzer Prize, became a major motion picture. The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien appeared in 1993. The three novels illustrate immigrant life in the United States, with remembrance and nostalgia serving as sources of narrative imagination.
The family saga of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is narrated in the first and third person, shifting from one character’s story to the next, from one recollection to another, moving back and forth in time, with flashbacks within flashbacks, and foreshadowing the future. The disjointed narrative, with extensive footnotes and inventory-like descriptions, enlivened with monologues and dialogues, finds a focus in the musical career and romantic adventures of Cesar and Nestor Castillo, the Mambo Kings.
The novel is divided into five sections; the first and last, the shortest and untitled, are narrated by Eugenio, who provides his own memories of events. The second and third sections, entitled “Side A” and “Side B,” respectively, refer in their subtitles to a night in 1980, at the Hotel Splendour, where Cesar spends his last hours, listening to the 1956 record album “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.” The fourth section, “Toward the End, While Listening to the Wistful ’Beautiful María of My Soul,’” includes a Spanish version of the song, handwritten by Cesar, and found next to him after his death.
Hijuelos presents the 1930’s and 1940’s music scene in Cuba, and then captures the times and spirit of the 1940’s and 1950’s in New York, when Latin music influenced American jazz and dancing required expertise in the arts of the mambo, rumba, and cha-cha. The “cu-bop” exemplified the crosscultural fusion of the Afro-Cuban music and hot bebop Harlem jazz. Sociocultural dualism is depicted in the novel with the fluid transition from English to Spanish, including expressions and titles in both languages and a bilingual version of the bolero “Beautiful María of My Soul,” or “Bellísima María de mi alma.”
Music is the driving force in the lives of the Mambo Kings. It gives them courage to disobey their father and leave their homeland in search of fame and the American Dream. After rising to stardom with their band in New York, they tour the United States. The performance on television with Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball represents the climax of their career. The American Dream of immigrants is often based on Hollywood films and television shows. As with music and literature, miracles are possible on screen; Cesar and Eugenio see the Mambo Kings resurrected and preserved on the rerun of the I Love Lucy show. Arnaz and Ball appear as characters in the novel’s fictional world.
At the best and worst times, musical creation allows the expression of feelings and spiritual survival. An epigraph at the beginning of the novel states that music transforms fiction into reality and “will make it all possible.” Nestor expresses pure love and desire in his song, hoping that Maria, possessed magically by it, will return to him. At the end, music brings memories of Cuba to Cesar, and as he listens to the notes, bouncing back and forth in time and place and “swirling inside him like youth,” he feels pain and death taken away.
In the novel, lives are re-created, most of all, through the willful exercise of memory and imagination. In the Hotel Splendour, Cesar relives the glories of the...
(This entire section contains 835 words.)
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past and the complex relationships with family, friends, women, and age. His encounters with ghosts after Nestor’s death provide touches of Magical Realism, denoting the Afro-Cuban influence in his childhood. Sad memories of his abusive father are compensated with images of the loving, religious mother and the caring black women involved with magic. The novel depicts discrimination evident in both Cuba and the United States. The prejudiced father is proud to be a white “gallego” from Spain. In the United States, although the brothers have light skin, their “Latin look” and Spanish language make them “spics,” and black musicians are segregated.
Cesar inherits his father’s machismo and his sexist attitude toward women, acting like a stereotypical, flamboyant Latin lover, ending up with regrets and fears of lifelong loneliness without love. Nestor fears that he can never be a “real macho in the kingdom of machos” and yet, while he adores the mythic Maria, he mistreats his wife, Delores, trying to stop her from going to college. Eugenio inherits his family’s melancholia; finally, remembering his father and uncle, he dreams of hearts liberated from pain, reaching “toward the sky, floating away.”
Hijuelos’s novel represents Cuban American literary expression. Cuba is experienced through the nostalgic remembrance of immigrants from the island nation. The younger generation, born in the United States, re-creates the memories, depicting Cuban culture and its influence in the United States.
