Thoughts Without Cigarettes

May 2, 2011
A modest yet inspired look back at his Manhattan upbringing by Cuban immigrants takes Pulitzer Prizeâwinning Hijuelos from the early 1950s through the extraordinary success of his second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Hijuelos's memoir, at times verbose, is very much a tender tribute to his parents. A campesino who immigrated to New York City in the early 1940s and worked as a short-order cook at the Biltmore Men's Bar, his "pop" was a largehearted man who loved to entertain his Cuban friends and eat and drink heartily; his voluble, anxious mother, from an upper-middle-class Cuban family, accompanied her new husband to America and remained fairly isolated in their Morningside Heights apartment, without English or job prospects, growing increasingly disgruntled by her husband's big-spending, lady-killing ways. The defining event of Hijuelos's childhood was his contracting deadly nephritis at age four while on a trip home to Cuba with his mother. Not only was he hospitalized for nearly a year and put on a strict diet for most of his childhood, but the illness, termed his "Cuban disease," also caused a rupture from his maternal language and his sense of being Cuban. Gradually he educated himself at City College, winning enthusiastic mentors like Donald Barthelme and Frederic Tuten, and transforming this awkward, rudderless "work in progress" into a gracious writer of well-deserved stature.

April 15, 2011

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Hijuelos (Beautiful Maria of My Soul, 2010, etc.) revisits the people and experiences whose confluence created his most celebrated work, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989).

The author's life did not begin propitiously. The son of Cuban immigrants, he developed a debilitating case of nephritis after a boyhood visit to Cuba. After a year in a convalescent hospital, he was finally able to return home, where his mother, a complex figure whom Hijuelos spent decades trying to understand, protected him ferociously. But the author celebrates his father, notably in the book's dazzling final paragraph. Hijuelos recalls an odd ambivalence about the Spanish language. Able to comprehend it completely, he refrained from speaking it throughout his boyhood, feeling costive whenever he tried. An indifferent student in childhood, he drifted aimlessly through Harlem's schools, finding himself in and out of a variety of scrapes—fighting, smoking, drinking, some dealing. He took up the guitar, found he had talent, and credits this discovery as the first of several that preserved him. After high school, he bounced around, then began some off-and-on undergraduate programs, beginning at Bronx Community College, eventually ending up at CCNY, where he got into a writing seminar with Donald Barthelme, who became a longtime friend. From then on, good fortune hovered nearby, and he met numerous literary luminaries. He eventually crossed paths with just about everyone from the era—Vonnegut, Mailer, Gardner, Irving. His adolescent memories percolate with sex—with his encounters, his fantasies and even with some graphic recollections involving, in one case, whipped cream, in another, a bride who entertains a wedding guest most generously. The tale ends with the publication of Mambo Kings, its wild reception and its amazing aftermath—and with a stirring condemnation of a literary world that ignores Latino writers.

Uneven—but with peerless evocations of people and of a struggle to find a voice.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

January 1, 2011

Mambo King Hijuelos gamely chronicles his life in this memoir: growing up in a working-class Manhattan neighborhood; catching a dread disease while visiting pre-Castro Cuba and spending a year shut up in a hospital, hardly able to communicate; hunting for the sense of self he finally found through writing. What's exciting here is how this account promises to illuminate his wonderful books. For all literati; the author's first nonfiction.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 15, 2011
The author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) and other critically acclaimed novels turns to nonfiction with this wryly self-deprecating memoir about his young life and gradual transformation into a writer. An outsider many times over, Hijuelos grew up in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, a sickly child who was hospitalized for almost a year while recovering from a kidney ailment. Although his mother and father were Cuban immigrants, Hijuelos looked more like an Anglo, and he never learned to speak Spanish, alienating him from the world of his parents just as his poor health and his mothers obsessive need to protect him distanced him from peers. He came to writing late, showing no interest in books until he enrolled at CUNY and took classes from Donald Barthelme and Susan Sontag. But even with their encouragement, he spent nearly a decade working in advertising until, finally, he broke through with the surprising success of Mambo Kings. What is most appealing about this account is the almost bemused manner in which Hijuelos describes his early years, as if not quite certain that he really was the person he recalls. Unlike in so many other writerly memoirs, Hijuelos makes no attempt to turn his life into a narrative, to breathe meaning into it as he would a novel. Rather, he simply remembers, sometimes with melancholy prompted not only by his own difficulties but also by the frustrations of his parents, sometimes with fondness, as when he reflects upon his alcoholic fathers joie de vivre and his overprotective mothers poetic soul. Its very lack of artifice gives this quiet, thoughtful memoir its subtle power.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)