My two-person book club, in which a friend and I alternately choose a book for both of us to read, recently finished an excellent novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, writtten by Oscar Hijuelos and published in 1989. Wikipedia puts it in the genre of “magical realism,” but I wouldn’t call it that, as the “magic” consists only of the main characters having fantasies that might have occurred but didn’t.
At any rate, it’s a longie—407 pages in my library version—but a goodie, recognized with a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1990. The story contains at least one huge spoiler that I won’t describe, but it’s a spoiler that divides the book into two parts, and that bipartite structure helps make the book so good.
“Mambo Kings” is the name of a Cuban-music band organized by two brothers, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, who immigrated from Cuba in 1949, hoping to achieve musical fame in America. They find both living in America and finding gigs tough, and one of the best parts of the book is the vivid description of problems faced and lives lived by Cuban immigrants. As my book-pal emailed me, one of these aspects was
” . . . . the fact that the book never left the world of the Cuban Americans or a made any concessions except indirectly to events exterior that world.”
There are five dominant elements in the lives of Cesar and Nestor: music (always mambo, rumba, and other Hispanic stuff), love, sex (often but not always separable), booze (a solvent for the brothers’ troubles), and memories. I don’t know how Hijuelos learned so much about Cuban music, but it permeates the book, with dozens of musicians named and recognized. Hijuelos, the son of two Cuban immigrants, must have either been inundated with the music of his parents, or learned it for the book—or both. You too will learn a lot, and you’ll surely have heard of at least one Cuban musician who appears repeatedly in the tale: Desi Arnaz of the “I Love Lucy” television show. (I take this back: you have to be of a certain age to know him and the show.) In the book, Arnaz invites Cesar and Nestor to play on his show, which makes them briefly famous, and then befriends the brothers for life.
Nestor is hopelessly and fruitlessly in love with a woman he left behind in Cuba, while Cesar, justifiably proud of his pinga, beds an army of women but never finds real love, perhaps impeded by the memory of his beloved mother left behind in Cuba. And both the brothers are ridden with memories of their youth on the island, so you’ll also learn quite a bit about the lower rungs of Cuban life (they grew up in a poor farming family). The sex is frequent and graphic, perhaps surprisingly so for a Pulitzer winner, but it’s integral to the fruitless search for love. My book pal added this:
“despite all the sex (and there’s a LOT of it), it’s at its heart a book about the love between two brothers.”
It’s a colorful, fast-paced, wonderfully inventive and well-written story, and well deserved its acclaim. In the NY Times review of the book in 1989, Michiko Kakutani, a notoriously harsh critic, lauds Mambo Kings. A few excerpts to give an opinion besides mine:
Indeed, Oscar Hijuelos’s remarkable new novel is another kind of American story – an immigrant story of lost opportunities and squandered hopes. While it dwells in bawdy detail on Cesar’s sexual escapades, while it portrays the musical world of the 50’s in bright, primary colors, the novel is essentially elegiac in tone -a Chekhovian lament for a life of missed connections and misplaced dreams.
. . . With his sympathetic, yet uncompromising portrait of Cesar, Mr. Hijuelos has created a character who will continue to inhabit readers’ imaginations long after they have finished this book; and with his sharply sketched supporting cast of characters he has also succeeded in fashioning a colorful fictional world. Nestor’s wistful wife, Delores, who dreams of bettering herself through books; Vanna, Cesar’s flamboyant mistress, who eventually settles down to life in Co-op City with a postal worker; his shady business partner, Perez, who has made a fortune through prostitution and drug-dealing, and his sensible friend Manny, who has saved all his money to buy a small bodega – together, these friends, lovers and family members give us a portrait of a tight-knit immigrant community struggling to survive in the promised land of New York.
By turns street-smart and lyrical, impassioned and reflective, ”The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” is a rich and provocative book – a moving portrait of a man, his family, a community and a time.
If Kakutani liked it, that’s another reason to read it. “Rich” is an adjective that is absolutely accurate, while the sometimes graphic descriptions of sex are no longer so “provocative.”
Click below to see the Amazon site. A paperback is only ten bucks.
In the movie version of the novel, Desi Arnaz Jr played his father. The director said that they needed someone who could play Desi Arnaz, not Ricky Ricardo.
I remember Siskel and Ebert saying that Latin music was very big in the 1950s and no one ever talks about it, and they were glad to see a movie about it.
Checked out Mambo Kings listing in Toronto library – it’s on hold for someone else — maybe another WEIT reader?
There was a movie in ’92. I remember it because my wife and I were with another couple. I didn’t want to see it, but gave in because the other 3 did. Afterward, I was the only one of the 4 of us who liked it. It’s pretty good, but not prize-worthy like the novel.
Seriously? Two comments?
My kishkes are in turmoil.
Just checked on Amazon and a copy of the paperback is $96.00! Will get it at my local library, probably through interlibrary loan.