Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

Starred review from September 7, 2015
This vividly imagined and detailed epic about two giants of the 19th century is the product of over a decade of work; Hijuelos was still revising the manuscript up until his untimely death in 2013. In his late teens, the author became captivated by Sir Henry Morton Stanley and his extraordinary trajectory from a poverty-stricken Welsh orphan to a world-renowned explorer; Hijuelos also discovered that Stanley had a friendship with Mark Twain. Using third-person narrative, letters, and journal entries (all fabricated), and by bringing in Stanley’s wife, the painter Dorothy Tennant, as a foil between the two men, the author brilliantly breathes life into Victorian times. Particular focus is paid to Stanley’s early life in America, and an entirely concocted journey he took to Cuba with Twain in search of Stanley’s adoptive father and namesake. Stanley, formal and somewhat rigid, though certainly erudite and keen for adventure, contrasts with Twain, the more relaxed and gifted speaker whose humor endeared him to audiences around the world. The author depicts not only the peace of mind the two get from family life, but also their various setbacks—the financial trials beset by Twain and the heartbreaking family deaths he suffered, and the illnesses that plagued Stanley his whole life. Hijuelos’s death is made all the more poignant by an observation Stanley makes in an introduction for one of Twain’s speaking engagements: “Our literature is our legacy, and if there is such a thing as ghosts, literature will be the only verifiable version of them.” How lucky we are to have this rich novel.

September 1, 2015
Posthumous publication of an ambitious, atypical historical novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. When Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, 1989, etc.) died of a heart attack in the fall of 2013, he had been working for more than a dozen years on this 19th-century epic concerning the unlikely but close friendship of two of the most famous men in America. They had met working on a riverboat, a couple of aspiring writers, well before one would travel to Africa in search of Dr. Livingstone and the other would become a beloved humorist under the pen name of Mark Twain. Since Hijuelos has long been known for voluptuary narratives of Cuba and Cuban America, filled with song and sex, the Victorian primness of the various tones he employs here stands in stark contrast (though a trip to Cuba proves pivotal). The novel encompasses long stretches of unpublished manuscripts purportedly written by Stanley and his wife, as well as extended correspondence between each of them and Twain. Stanley had been an orphan taken under the wing of a benefactor (whose surname the young man took), and there's a sense throughout that the way Stanley portrays his life is not the way it actually transpired. With Stanley's health and that of Twain's wife in parallel decline, there's a hint of romantic triangle, what Dorothy Stanley calls "some kind of autumnal infatuation," though history left that attraction unrequited, as she remarried shortly after her husband's death. The meditations on time and death in the book's last third are particularly poignant given the author's own untimely passing, but the whole of the novel is unwieldy, with awkward dialogue ("I am wondering what you can tell me about yourself") and juxtapositions (a section titled "Clemens in That Time" follows Lady Stanley's extended account of her husband's death). An Afterword by Hijuelos' widow explains that he was working on the novel up to his death, having written "thousands of pages that he attempted to winnow down to publishable size, even as he continued to expand upon the story." This book is good news for Hijuelos fans, but considering its flaws, it's tantalizing to think of what it would have been like if the author had managed to finish it himself.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 15, 2015
Chronicling the friendship between Welsh-born explorer Henry Morton Stanley and beloved American raconteur Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain), Hijuelos' deeply researched final novel was completed just before he died, in 2013. Although this expansive look at the connection between two eminent nineteenth-century men may be a departure from his examinations of the immigrant experience, his gift for evoking his protagonists' rich interior lives is on full display. The novel shows a remarkable fidelity to historical voice. It's told through a combination of formats, including straight narrative, letters, memoir, and diary entriesall invented, and convincingly so. Even Stanley's cabinet manuscript about his and Samuel's excursion to Cuba fits with the real man's tendency to blur or exaggerate the truth. From their initial meeting, aboard a Mississippi steamship, then moving through their stints on the lecture circuit, Stanley's relationship with vivacious artist Dorothy Tennant, and their beautifully moving ruminations on mortality in their twilight years, their rapport survives several differences of opinion. Both come to loathe slavery but disagree about religion and the value of imperialism, particularly in Africa. By observing them at many moments of vulnerability, readers gain insights into their makeup. Although the book feels unbalanced in places due to its unusual cobbled-together structure, it's an extraordinary feat of imaginative historical re-creation.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Hijuelos was greatly popular with library readers, and he will be missed by them; and his last novel will garner many reservation requests.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

June 1, 2015

Hijuelos gave us many superb novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, but he apparently worked on this one for decades without finally releasing it to the world. Discovered by Hijuelos's widow after his death in 2013, it chronicles the sojourn of journalist-explorer Henry Stanley; his wife, the painter Dorothy Tennant; and Mark Twain, Stanley's longtime friend, as they head for Cuba in search of Stanley's father. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2015

This absorbing and luminous novel by the late Hijuelos, which he was still editing at the time of his death, reimagines the friendship between Mark Twain and British explorer Henry David Stanley. Here, Stanley winds up in New Orleans in the mid-1800s and meets Twain on a riverboat when both are young men. They strike up a friendship based on a mutual love of reading and literature and become closer when they journey together to Cuba directly before the start of the American Civil War to seek out Stanley's sort-of adoptive father, afterward going their separate ways. The novel focuses more on Stanley, seen here as an interesting and enigmatic character who late in life marries the beautiful, much younger, upper-class Dorothy Tennant, an artist. While Twain endures the unexpected death of his daughter and the long decline of his wife, Livy, Stanley suffers from various maladies contracted in Africa; after his death, his wife publishes his autobiography, parts of which make up the narrative. VERDICT The novel, which contains letters, speeches, fragments of Stanley's autobiography, diary entries, and dialog, all of which Hijuelos evidently created, succeeds in conjuring a bygone era from rural 19th-century Cuba to upper-class London society. Well written and engaging, this novel may lack some of the fire of the author's best-known work, but it is a intriguing entry in his output and will appeal to his fans and those who enjoy historical fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 5/11/15.]--James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2015

This absorbing and luminous novel by the late Hijuelos, which he was still editing at the time of his death, reimagines the friendship between Mark Twain and British explorer Henry David Stanley. Here, Stanley winds up in New Orleans in the mid-1800s and meets Twain on a riverboat when both are young men. They strike up a friendship based on a mutual love of reading and literature and become closer when they journey together to Cuba directly before the start of the American Civil War to seek out Stanley's sort-of adoptive father, afterward going their separate ways. The novel focuses more on Stanley, seen here as an interesting and enigmatic character who late in life marries the beautiful, much younger, upper-class Dorothy Tennant, an artist. While Twain endures the unexpected death of his daughter and the long decline of his wife, Livy, Stanley suffers from various maladies contracted in Africa; after his death, his wife publishes his autobiography, parts of which make up the narrative. VERDICT The novel, which contains letters, speeches, fragments of Stanley's autobiography, diary entries, and dialog, all of which Hijuelos evidently created, succeeds in conjuring a bygone era from rural 19th-century Cuba to upper-class London society. Well written and engaging, this novel may lack some of the fire of the author's best-known work, but it is a intriguing entry in his output and will appeal to his fans and those who enjoy historical fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 5/11/15.]--James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.