A legendary Cuban-American storyteller enters the Library of America series with a volume gathering three seductive and profound novels about family, desire, music, and lossOscar Hijuelos (1951–2013) is one of the most acclaimed Latino writers of the last half century. Here are three classic novels that opened a window on the Cuban-American experience, announcing a major new voice in our literature.
Hijuelos launched his career with
Our House in the Last World (1983), a resonant and nuanced novel portraying one immigrant’s family story in midcentury Manhattan. At its center is Hector Santino, whose family has left the “home province of Fidel Castro, Batista, and Desi Arnaz” to settle in New York City, where their ebullient expectations of the good life in America lead, inevitably, to myriad disappointments and adjustments.
In his best-known novel,
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989)—a book that Gabriel Garcia Marquez said he would have liked to have written—Hijuelos offers an unforgettable tribute to Latin music and its place in American culture around the middle of the twentieth century. Earning Hijuelos the Pulitzer Prize, the first to be awarded a Latino novelist,
The Mambo Kings is also about the fleeting nature of fame and celebrity as well as the more profound themes of love, desire, and family.
The poignant
Mr. Ives’ Christmas (1995), which Hijuelos once noted was an attempt to write a Christmas story “without being corny,” takes up themes of loss and redemption in a story that poses the age-old question of why bad things happen to good people.
This Library of America edition marks the entrance of Hijuelos into the series with a deluxe hardcover edition that includes as well a newly researched chronology of the author’s life.
The first Latino novelist to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Oscar Hijuelos (1951?2013) wrote rich and radiant novels that brought the Cuban American immigrant experience into the heart of American literature. "I marveled," recalls Juan Felipe Herrera, at "how meticulous he was and how deep he got into the lives of Latino and Cuban Americans in the United States." Hijuelos launched his career with Our House in the Last World (1983), a masterful recreation of the psychological pressures of migration. At its center is the young Hector Santinio, whose family has left the "home province of Fidel Castro, Batista, and Desi Arnaz" to settle in New York City, buoyed by hopeful expectations of America but drawn back by the nostalgic pull of Cuba, transformed in memory into a paradise it never was. As Hector and his brother Horacio toggle between worlds old and new, they achieve a hard-won sense of who they are and what they might become. In his best-known novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989)"a book that Gabriel Garcâia Mâarquez said he wished he had written" Hijuelos offers an unforgettable tribute to Latin music and its place in American culture. Bandleader Cesar Castillo, at a distance of several decades, recalls the passionate life and worldly pleasures he enjoyed as his band catapulted to momentary stardom, culminating in his appearance, with his brother, Nestor, on the I Love Lucy show. Pulsing with a rhythm and cadence uniquely its own, The Mambo Kings is a beguiling meditation on the fleeting nature of fame and celebrity as well as more profound themes of love, desire, and family. Successful in business, blessed with a happy family, the hero of Mr. Ives' Christmas (1995) appears to have achieved the American dream until his life is shattered by the murder of his seventeen-year-old son.
