Oscar Hijuelos
It is a rare alchemy - combining the written word, timing, and personal circumstances - but every reader has I believe, a few books that haunt them, often years after the reading, books that will emerge unbidden from memory, or which will forever be linked to an emotion, or an experience. Such books form a personal library of sorts: We carry them with us, not just the works themselves but our experiences of them.
For almost 20 years I've been carrying The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love with me. I read Oscar Hijuelos's second novel shortly after its publication in 1990 (likely around the time the book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the first time a Hispanic writer had ever won that award), and while I was transfixed, and shaken, I had no idea that almost two decades later the phrase "beautiful Maria of my soul" would have become such a fixture in my mind.
The novel follows the lives of two brothers, Cuban emigrés to the United States in the early 1950s. Nestor and Caesar Castillo are musicians with two claims to limited fame. First was the song "Beautiful Maria of My Soul", of which Nestor wrote more than 50 versions, all celebrating the Cuban beauty who stole, then broke, his heart. The song became a minor hit and led to their second brush with fame: an appearance on the I Love Lucy show, playing Ricky Ricardo's cousins, who join the band at the Tropicana to perform their best-known song.
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love was an unabashedly passionate, idealized novel, whether focusing on the tempestuous affair between Nestor and Maria (who is, in many ways, less a character than she is a manifestation of love and desire) or on Caesar's slow decline, drinking himself to death in a rundown hotel room, listening to "Beautiful Maria of My Soul" as he ruminates on the past. It was a novel of extremes, of love found and love lost, of lives cut short and lives lived too long. It was breathtaking.
With his new novel, Hijuelos returns to that story, but from a vastly different perspective. Like the flip-side of a record, Beautiful Maria of My Soul is the story of Maria Garcia y Cifuentes, or, as the novel's subtitle coyly puts it, "The Lady Behind a Famous Song". It is a powerful read that not only supplements and informs the earlier novel, but forever changes it.
Following her mother's death and her father's remarriage, Maria moves from the tiny family farm, which is all she has known of the world, to sprawling Havana. It is 1947, and the city is at its Republican peak, with dance halls and clubs appealing to locals and tourists alike. Maria, "nothing less than spectacular, as far as the female of the species goes," finds work as a dancer. It is at the club that she meets Ignacio, a mobster, who first woos her, then beats her. In fleeing Ignacio one night, she meets Nestor Castillo, a struggling trumpet player, and changes his life.
Her life, however, doesn't change, and this is the key to fully appreciating Beautiful Maria of My Soul. The novel is truly the counterpoint to The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love in virtually every respect. It is a hard-nosed, realistic, gritty novel, deliberately eschewing the passion and romance of the earlier work. Maria is a pragmatic woman, and the story of her life as she recounts it - from the perspective of a woman in her sixties, long-settled in Miami - to her daughter Teresa, a pediatrician, is an account of survival, of hard choices and bad decisions that nonetheless add up, as they always do, to a life.
That hardness, so at odds with the lushness of The Mambo Kings, is initially difficult to take, the reality of Maria and her existence so different from Nestor's impassioned vision. The reality, however, soon develops its own appeal, and one comes to appreciate the nature of Maria's struggles and to immerse oneself into her life.
The turning point of the novel comes subtly, about halfway through. After recounting, from a different perspective, the brothers' initial meeting with Desi Arnaz, Hijuelos adds a footnote, which reads, in part, "...hearsay and the passage of time would embellish that story somewhat differently." With the words "according to one of the neighborhood kids...a plump, myopic, and curious fellow," Hijuelos interjects himself as fictionalizer into the larger narrative of the two novels. The repercussions of that footnote will be felt later in the novel's closing pages.
It is as true with books as it is with anything else: You can't go home again. Readers looking to experience a continuation of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love will instead confront a vastly different novel, with its own power, its own emotional force and rewards. Beautiful Maria of My Soul is a subtler work, and in many ways a stronger one, but there's really no reason to choose. Read both novels to allow Hijuelos's talents their full breadth.
Robert J. Wiersema is a Victoria-based writer and bookseller. His new novel, Bedtime Story, will be published by Random House this fall.