Oh my! It's truly a challenge to know where to even begin with this one.

Cesar and Nestor, two brothers, grew up in Cuba in the early 20th century. They had a loving mother, but unfortunately, a father who physically abused them. Instead of following in their father's footsteps and engaging in farming, they turned to music as a means to a different life. Cesar learned to play the piano, guitar, and other instruments, but his real talent lay in singing. He pulled his brother Nestor into the musician's life with him, and Nestor became a talented trumpet player. They played traditional Cuban music of that period, such as mambo and rumba.

In the late 1940s, the brothers escaped to NYC. They were fleeing not only their father but also the intense competition for musician jobs in Cuba. Cesar was handsome, charismatic, and macho, while Nestor was consistently melancholic and sad.

The other significant character in this story is the Cuban culture, both as found in Cuba and among the immigrants from Cuba in NYC. It's also about musicians trying to make a living in NYC in the 50s. You find yourself completely immersed in this world. It's a macho man's world, and the story is told from a man's perspective. A constant in this world is sex - sex and more sex, with sexual acts, sex talk, and references to sexual body parts. You have to look beyond the sex to truly understand the characters and the story. And yet, the story and the world it describes would not be the same without the sex.

At times, the story does drag. The beginning was especially slow, and there are parts that feel repetitive. However, it is a unique world that the author has created, with many layers - sounds, tastes, and aromas. There is passion - for women, for music, and for food. This is not a book that I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone. You should approach it with a clear understanding of what you're getting into.

Oscar Hijuelos is an exceptionally talented writer.

He has the remarkable ability to bring a uniquely American experience and a particular era of music to vivid life with a passionate honesty that earns him great acclaim.

In New York, one can deeply sense the alienation of the brothers as they search for their Cuban heritage. Their longing for their lost country is an unquenchable thirst that haunts them.

There is a profound emptiness within them, a painful longing that can only be temporarily alleviated by alcohol, music, and love.

Trapped in the machismo that prevailed during their prime, they find only a hollow solace. They struggle to form a fulfilling or enduring love, as their many relationships are exciting but fleeting.

Even the deeper ones do not stand the test of time. Yet, through it all, the elder Castillo discovers that life can be lived intensely, even if that intensity is momentary.

His descriptions of his love for his mother are deeply moving, and his sacrifices to learn and pursue his art are worthy of respect. These are sacrifices that every dedicated artist can identify with.

Hijuelos clearly understands the music that is crafted, like much great art, from the agony of the spirit. The reader is transported to another era with a realism that feels authentic.

Their suffering is the wellspring of their consciousness and the essence of their best music. The music is all-encompassing, from the clanking of the pipes in claves to the boleros that define their experience.

The encounters with Desi Arnaz add a nice creative touch, rounding out their experience and serving as a contrast to their own poverty in the midst of the American Dream.

Hijuelos seems to have drawn on his own cultural experience in New York with great conviction and depth. His writing style is truly innovative, and the honesty in his writing is genuinely captivating.

DNF - So Disappointing

The beginning of this piece is truly deceiving. It starts off with an extremely engaging six-page introduction that hooks the reader's attention. However, as the story progresses, it quickly becomes choppy and entirely focuses on sex. This approach completely fails to develop the atmosphere or evoke the nostalgia that the author seems to be aiming for. Instead, it feels like being trapped at a bar next to an old drunk guy who insists on telling you every single detail of his life story. He goes on and on about how he used to be a musician and how he slept with just about every chick in NYC back then. Well, bully for you, guy. But seriously, can I leave now? This story just doesn't deliver on what it initially promised, leaving the reader feeling let down and disappointed.

I read this back in 2001. At that time, I was in a rather chaotic state as I was in between comprehensive exams and transferring to library school. It was truly my first exploration into Hijuelos's works, and I found it extremely enjoyable.

My impression back then was that this is a novel that is rich in nostalgia and memory. As I delved into its pages, I could almost vividly hear the music and sense the intense passion of the characters.

To be honest, I'm really not certain where some of the negative reviews for this book on GoodReads originate from. But as we often say in libraries, "never apologize for your book tastes." Personally, I believe that those who gave bad reviews might have overlooked something. However, it's also true that each reader has their own unique relationship with a book, and each book finds its own suitable readers.

If some of those who didn't like this book decide to give Hijuelos another chance, they might want to give Mr. Ives' Christmas a try. It could potentially offer them a different perspective on Hijuelos's writing and perhaps change their opinion.

Read for the 2022 PopSugar reading challenge. This is "A book by a Latin American author." It's also the winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Imagine if Lou Bega's 1999 earworm Mambo No. 5, where he lists a bunch of women's names he has the hots for, was transformed into a live human man. Now picture this sentient song eager to spend all his time sharing his sexual encounters with those women and many more than the song ever named. These encounters involve detailed descriptions of his big dick, the specific placement of moles around the women's nipples, and the color and thickness of the women's pubic hair. Also, imagine that the song is a real jerk, looking back with nostalgia at the end of his long life of mistreating women. The result would surely be this book. It really sucks.

There were some elements in there that could have been put together in a better way. The plot of the book is about two brothers, the Castillos. They first leave rural Cuba and go to Havana, and then make their way to the New York City music scene in the 1930s. They get a big break when they play at a venue where Desi Arnaz is in the audience. Arnaz, portrayed as a kind of friendly uncle to all Cuban musician immigrants, invites the brothers to appear on an episode of I Love Lucy. When I opened this book, I never expected the character of Ricky Ricardo to show up. It was interesting to see some depictions of Havana as a real, lively place with an international scene. That kind of image hasn't existed in America in my lifetime and almost in my parents' as well. Later, some other Cubans arrive and complain about how much of Cuban life has been focused on making the Russians happy. The main character, the Mambo King, is not interested in this. Maybe a less absurd portrayal of a man (seriously, he even refers to his "big thing" when he thinks about peeing) could have given a fascinating perspective on the evolution of a diaspora of people who can't go home. But this is not that book.

More than a few of the Pulitzer Prize winners are about the boredom or life regrets of crappy white men. Changing it to a crappy Cuban man didn't make it any better.

Looking at her, Nestor felt faint-hearted. She was more beautiful than the sea, than the morning light, than a wildflower field. Her whole body, agitated and sweaty from her struggles, gave off an aromatic female scent. It was somewhere between meat and perfume and ocean air, assailing Nestor's nostrils, sinking down into his body like mercury, and twisting in his gut like Cupid's naughty arrow. He was so shy that he couldn't look at her anymore, and she liked this, as men were always looking at her. "My name is Maria," she told him.

He is Nestor Castillo, a young man born on a farm and coming to Havana to become a musician like his big brother Cesar. In the big city, he meets a beautiful woman, has a torrid love affair with her, and then loses her. While Cesar is a libertine who changes his women more often than his shirts, Nestor cannot recover from this first love affair. Not even when he goes to New York like many of his fellow Cuban artists in the 1950s at the height of the Mambo Craze in American nightclubs. Not even when he meets another beautiful Cuban immigrant and marries her. Not even when, at the height of his success, he sings with his brother in a Hollywood television programme about the pain of lost love in a melancholic bolero "Bella Maria de Mi Alma".

Nestor remains distant, taciturn, tormented by absences. He misses not only Maria but also the land of his birth and childhood. He is transformed into a symbol of the exiled soul. His continuing grief is a monument to gallego melancholy. Like Nestor, most of his compatriots work on poorly paid day jobs, struggle to raise families and maintain the spirit of the homeland in an alien land. Many of his friends are that way, troubled souls. They would always seem happy - especially when they talk about women and music - but when they finish floating through the euphoric layer of their sufferings, they open their eyes in a world of pure sadness and pain.

This sadness is in stark contrast with the carnival atmosphere of the dancing halls. Maybe it explains the wild abandon of these people to the rhythms of the mambo, their sentimentality and their readiness to come together in moments of need. It also explains why their lives are best expressed through the music they compose, sing at all hours of the day, dance and even make love to. It may also explain the attraction exercised by the African drumbeats, the raw emotions and the joy for life on the more restrained and self-conscious American audience in the 1950s.

From a structural perspective, the history of the two brothers, first in Cuba and later in New York, is told through the songs they composed and sung together with their band The Mambo Kings. An elderly Cesar reminisces alone and drunk in a cheap hotel room, listening to old 78's self-printed records, thinking back to the glory days of white silken suits, Panama hats and endless nights of revelry, spicy food, loud music, voluptuous women and companionship.

The story is non-linear, following Cesar's "scrambled" train of thought, jumping forward and backward in time. Yet the individual snapshots are painstakingly and lovingly expanded, added upon and filled with extravagant minute details by Oscar Hijuelos until they become a panoramic and comprehensive big canvas memorial to the times and the people of Little Havana, to the legacy of a Cuban lifestyle that was disappearing fast under the pressure of revolutionary changes and modern values.

This generation has lost its sense of elegance, exclaims Cesar in 1970. Looking at the picture of the dapper young men with immaculate suits and pencil-thin moustaches, remembering huge ballrooms with sparkling chandeliers and ladies in evening gowns, sighing over past memories of dainty underwear and high heeled shapely legs. Most of all Cesar is missing his brother and his music, the energy and the resilience that he took for granted in his youth. He's paying the price now for all those fat cigars and glasses of rum, for the sleepless nights and casual amorous encounters.

I was already a 'Cubanophile' long before I read the present novel. It started, as with many of my contemporaries, courtesy of the Buena Vista Social Club and the likes of Ibrahim Ferrer, Compay Segundo and Ruben Gonzales. I was thus already predisposed to enjoy Oscar Hijuelo's history and to look forward to the many tidbits of information and cameo appearances of popular artists from the island and from the American scene. The music already spoke to me of the people and of their passion, of their laughter and of their sadness walking hand in hand. Hijuelos didn't disappoint, but I think I can understand how another reader may view the baroque extravagance of the descriptive passages, the almost academic essays on the origins, inspiration and style of the songs, the pervasive melancholy of the whole presentation as a drag and as self-indulgence on the part of a writer who is unable to get detached enough from his subject. I confess that even for me it was not a smooth ride, and the density of the text often put me to sleep after a day at work. The chronic depression of the two brothers started to get annoying, especially in the second half of the novel, the one that focuses not on the 1950's dance craze, but on the later decadence of a once macho man. The mistreatment of women may be consistent with the period described, but it weights uncomfortably on the modern reader. There are numerous explicit sexual passages, necessary in my opinion to underline the character types, but liable to put stress on the more susceptible readers. Finally, for a book that claims to be apolitical, Hijuelos, through the mouthpiece of Cesar Castillo, unleashes quite vicious attacks on Castro and his revolutionaries, going so far as to mourn for Batista and to reproduce verbatim several of the most egregious pieces of propaganda circulated by the CIA.

There are though enough highlights to make me glad I was patient and read through to the end of the book. The novel weaves together fact and fiction so well that I had no way to tell which are the real musicians of the era and which are the fictional ones. All of them feel alive, ready to stand up and start blowing a trumpet or strumming a guitar, take a turn around the dance floor in the arms of a sultry Latino beauty. The very abundance of the minute details of day to day life that slow down the pacing are the ones that make the experience authentic and memorable. The cheap sentimentality and readiness for tears are proof that their hearts are not hardened, cynical and closed to the possibility of love.

I don't know if the famous bolero sung by Nestor and Cesar Castillo exists or not in one of the old mambo recordings, but it echoes still in my mind, almost two months after I finished the book. I know that I will listen more carefully to the lyrics next time I put in one of my own Cuban CD's, thinking of my own youthful disregard for the passage of time and my spendthrift attitude to friends and lovers.

Oh, love's sadness,
Why did you come to me?
I was happy before you
entered my heart.

How can I hate you
if I love you so?
I can't explain my torment,
for I don't know how to live
without your love...
What delicious pain
love has brought to me
in the form of a woman.
My torment and ecstasy,
Maria, my life,
Beautiful Maria of my soul...

P.S. : I know there is a movie version of the novel, and I plan to find it. I'm glad I got to read the book first, since I don't think you can condense all the rich material here in only a couple of hours of screen time. Yet, I also know of another Cuban movie that is constructed around the music and the 1950's dance scene that did an excellent job with the subject, and I heartily recommend it: Fernando Trueba's animation feature "Chico and Rita".

“The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” is Oscar Hijuelos' remarkable homage to the vibrant Cuban music club scene in New York City during the early to middle years of the 20th century. The story unfolds through the lives of Cesar and Nestor Castillo, the titular Mambo Kings. This Pulitzer Prize-winning work is not just about music; it is also rich with machismo appetites and a sense of melancholy.

The brothers leave Cuba for NYC in pursuit of their musical careers. Along the way, they compose a hit song and even have the opportunity to appear on “I LOVE LUCY” after meeting Dezi Arnaz during one of their club shows. Cesar, the flamboyant frontman who relishes the emotive freedoms of singing boleros, sports a lifelong lot hairdo. Meanwhile, his younger brother, Nestor, is prone to brooding and reminiscing about the beautiful Maria who left him for another man.

Tragedy strikes, and one brother mourns, spending the rest of his life as an apartment super, seemingly ignoring his own mortality. However, the music never truly leaves his life. This is an earthy and engaging story about men and women who have a passion for sex, eating, dancing, and playing the cha cha cha, the rumba, and the mambo. It is a tale that beautifully captures the essence of a bygone era and the power of music to touch the soul. Muy bueno indeed!

I have discovered a novel that I believe is truly a gem but unfortunately, it seems to be underrated. This remarkable book delves into the lives of three Cuban men. Their individual stories unfold, and we witness how their destinies intricately cross and become tangled with one another. It's not just a tale of their personal experiences; it is also a book that places a strong emphasis on the theme of solidarity. It reminds me of the works of Garcia Marquez, yet with a unique twist as it incorporates the element of parties. The author has masterfully crafted a narrative that engages the reader from the very beginning and keeps them hooked until the end. The vivid descriptions and well-developed characters make this novel a must-read for anyone who appreciates good literature.

I got nearly to page 100 before I decided I'd had enough.

I thought there should be a really good story, given that it was awarded the Pulitzer. The first more than 30 pages were mostly the names of bands and band leaders of the 40s and 50s. I accepted this, boring as it was, as giving the reader a sense of the times in which the novel is to take place. During these pages, Cesar Castillo, the leader of the Mambo Kings, was obviously a randy sort - a drinker and a user of women.

Eventually there was more story. But was Oscar Hijelos living out his sexual fantasies on the page? There was not enough story and way too many erect and throbbing penises for me. It seemed that the author was overly focused on these sexual details rather than developing a more engaging and complex plot. The constant emphasis on such explicit content detracted from what could have been a more interesting exploration of the characters and their lives. I was disappointed that a Pulitzer-winning work would rely so much on this kind of gratuitous sexual imagery.

Perhaps if the author had balanced the sexual elements with a stronger narrative and more fully developed characters, the book would have been more to my liking. As it stands, I found it difficult to get through and was left with a sense of dissatisfaction.

I guess there was a plot within the story. However, I firmly believe that it was merely a thinly veiled guise for writing about an old man's penis.

Seriously speaking, every single page contains some sort of reference to the sexual adventures of this lustful old man. It is truly gross and, to a certain extent, a little depressing. Which, oddly enough, is somewhat provocative, I suppose.

EDIT: I have redacted my initial review that was filled with hatred. In fact, I might even contemplate re-reading this work from a more mature and non-sophomoric perspective.

*I was a sophomore in high school when I first read this and despised it with a passion. But now, with the passage of time and perhaps a bit more wisdom, I am willing to give it another chance and see if my perception has changed.

Really Pulitzer committee? Really?

The Pulitzer Prize is highly regarded in the field of journalism and literature. It represents excellence and outstanding achievement. However, there are times when one might question the decisions made by the Pulitzer committee.

Are their choices always truly representative of the best work? Do they consider all aspects and perspectives? It's not uncommon to hear debates and discussions about whether a particular award was truly deserved.

Perhaps the committee should reevaluate their selection process to ensure that it is as fair and comprehensive as possible. After all, the Pulitzer Prize has a significant impact on the careers and reputations of those who receive it.

We should strive for a system that recognizes and rewards the most outstanding work, while also being open to new and innovative ideas. Only then can the Pulitzer Prize continue to maintain its prestige and significance in the years to come.

I read this book for a book group and was truly astonished when I discovered it had won a Pulitzer prize. It serves as a remarkable illustration of how the same book can have such a profound impact on some readers while completely alienating others.

It contains in-depth details about musicians and the music scenes in both Cuba and the United States. As someone who once played music semi-professionally, I had high expectations of finding this aspect captivating. Normally, I have a great passion for learning about the world through fiction. However, due to my lack of empathy for the main character, Cesar (the Mambo King), it felt to me like a dull download of historical information from the driest of sources, much like a textbook.

The story of the Mambo King and his brother primarily centered around Cesar's sexual escapades, described in excruciating detail. In numerous parts of the book, his penis and his perception of its size are mentioned almost every other page. Some scenes are rather comical (I suspect unintentionally so), as women catch a glimpse of it and gasp in amazement. He believes it to be such a wonder that even when he is old and in the hospital, he arranges his gown to give the nurse a peek.

The women Cesar has sex with are countless, and they are mainly described by their body parts and sexual appetites. He treats his first wife horribly and is bewildered as to why she doesn't beg for him to return. The book is told from his perspective, looking back over his life. While on occasion he has an inkling of what he might have done differently, for the most part, he seems confused as to why he is alone and miserable after a lifetime of mistreating people.

The part of the book that managed to draw me in was the story of Cesar's sister-in-law, told mainly from her point of view. Her love for his brother, Nestor, her insatiable reading habit, her desire to attend college (despite it being essentially forbidden by her husband), and her struggles to make the best of her life made me truly wish for a better outcome for her.

I'm meeting with my book group tonight. I'm hoping we'll deviate from the norm and actually engage in a meaningful discussion about the book for more than just a few minutes. (Yes, I really need to find a new book group.) If we do, I'll be extremely curious to discover why those who liked it did so. I firmly believe that such a discussion can help me learn a great deal as a writer.

For writers, this is a good book to study as an example of framing a story largely through the eyes of someone reflecting on their life at the end. The story is presented in a non-linear fashion,跳跃 not only from the present to the past but also from different parts of the past to others. This led to some repetition of certain themes (including the brothers' appearance on I Love Lucy, which is mentioned repeatedly, although still probably a hundred times less than penises are). However, had I loved the book, the repetition likely wouldn't have bothered me, and I was indeed intrigued by the way the book was structured.

Coincidentally, the next book I picked up to read (Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet) is told from the perspective of a man looking back on his childhood. I'm thoroughly enjoying it. When I reach the end, I'll spend some time reflecting on why one book worked so well for me and the other didn't.