What Do I Read Next?
Oscar Hijuelos's debut novel, Our House in the Last World (1982), tells the story of a New Yorker who is deeply affected by his parents' tales of Oriente province in Cuba, the place they left before he was born. This novel was reissued with a new afterword by Hijuelos in 2002, courtesy of Persea Press.
In Hijuelos's book A Simple Habana Melody: From When the World Was Good (2002), Cuban music and longing are central themes. The story follows a Cuban composer traveling in Europe during the 1940s who is mistakenly detained in the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Claude McKay, a poet from Jamaica and a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, encapsulated the feeling of exile explored in Hijuelos's work through his poem “The Tropics in New York.” This poem is featured in Claude McKay: Selected Poems (1999).
In 1996, American musician Ry Cooder traveled to Cuba to create a documentary about a group of traditional Cuban musicians, some of whom had been performing since the 1950s. The film, The Buena Vista Social Club, directed by Wim Wenders, enjoyed a successful theatrical release for a documentary, and its soundtrack album became a bestseller. Buena Vista Social Club: The Companion Book to the Film, published by te Neures Publishing Company in May 2000, narrates how these musicians, overlooked for years, gained international recognition.
Critics have noted that Hijuelos's rich, descriptive writing style shows a clear influence from Gabriel García Márquez’s 1969 novel One Hundred Years Of Solitude. García Márquez's novel, which covers a century in the life of a fictional South American town, is regarded as one of the most significant works in Latin American literature. The latest edition was released by Harper Perennial in 1998.
Similar to The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Christina Garcia’s novel Dreaming in Cuban (1993) centers on a family that moved from Cuba to New York only to find themselves disconnected from their heritage due to the Communist revolution, which made returning difficult.
Popular Cuban-American author Beatriz Rivera’s novel Playing with Light (2000) explores a contemporary reading group of Cubans in Miami discussing a novel set in Havana during the 1870s, alongside a group of Cubans from the 1870s contemplating a futuristic story about Havana in the late 1990s. It was published by Arte Publico Press in 2000.
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