Oscar Hijuelos Analysis

What, if anything, is there distinctively Latino about the stories that Oscar Hijuelos tells?

“Men don’t have a clue about women, for the most part,” Hijuelos told an interviewer. How does his portrayal of female characters compare with his portrayal of male characters?

Cesar Castillo and Israel Levis are professional musicians, and particular pieces of music are crucial in the lives of other Hijuelos characters. How does the novelist use music to develop themes and portray character?

Famous historical figures, including Nikita Khrushchev, Desi Arnez, George Gershwin, and James Mason appear alongside fictional characters in Hijuelos’s novels. What is the effect?

In Empress of the Splendid Season, Lydia España keeps two small flags—one American and one Cuban— mounted atop her television set. What is the image and role of Cuba in Hijuelos’s novels?

“I’m a fairly melancholic person,” Hijuelos told an interviewer. How do his novels convey melancholy?

The Secrets of a Poor Man’s Life was Hijuelos’s working title for what became The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. How might that be an accurate description not only of that work but of other Hijuelos novels as well?

Although he has produced several short stories and poems, Oscar Hijuelos (ee-HWAY-lohs) gained wide readership for long fiction after publication of his first novel, Our House in the Last World, which he developed from a story line written on scraps of paper as he worked as a clerk for an advertising agency.

Oscar Hijuelos attained a large audience after he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Although Latino authors are often neglected by mainstream publishers and other media, Hijuelos broke through ethnic barriers with his persistence, his style, and his Pulitzer Prize. On the strength of his first novel, Hijuelos received several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize provided him with a stipend that allowed him to live in Italy for a year of composition and reflection.

Through Hijuelos’s observations, dark memories, and radiant storytelling, readers can appreciate Cuban immigrant culture. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love demonstrates the acceptance of Hispanic literature beyond the previous limited scope of small Latino presses. Critics labeled the book a breakthrough for Latino writers. A motion-picture adaptation of the novel, titled The Mambo Kings, was released in 1992. The work was also adapted as a stage musical and was slated to open on Broadway in the summer of 2005, but plans for the Broadway opening were dropped after a lackluster response to the show in San Francisco. In 2008, Hijuelos expanded his audience to include young adults with Dark Dude, a novel about an adolescent.