13
Apr
2009
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
People asked me what this book was about while I was reading it and I’ll tell you what I told them. It is almost entirely about sex and how big the main characters’ members are.
For you, I will expand, because one sentence is never really sufficient for any Pulitzer-prize-winning book. Not that I really liked it that much. I actually wished that the narrator would shut up about sex already and get on with the story because it seemed like we had heard it all before. The dude has a ten inch penis and likes all women, especially hourglass-shaped women. He likes it in all positions and likes to both give and receive oral sex.
The book itself is laid out like an album, with an A-side and a B-side. The A-side is mostly better than the B-side, which jumps over whole periods in time. The plot is about two brothers, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, who emigrate to the U.S. from Cuba in the late 1940’s. They land in NYC, where they live the unpredictable, laid-back life of musicians at night and hard laborers during the day.
Cesar is the older, raunchier, more aggressive brother; Nestor is they shy, poetic, romantic one. I might not say that these characters are one-dimensional, but Cesar is the one who wants women to think of him as a “macho” man, and Nestor is the one who goes out of his way to help people.
Pining for the unrequited love he left behind in Cuba, Nestor composes the canción, “Beautiful Maria of my Soul.” One night they run into Desi Arnez and Lucille Ball at a small club in New York. They play the canción and wind up on the “I Love Lucy” show as Desi’s cousins visiting from Cuba to play a gig with him. This is basically the high point of their lives, for which no one back in New York will ever forget them. This takes us up to about half way through the A-side. There is also a ton of sex and drinking and talking about their penises interspersed throughout there.
One night, coming back from a gig, they get into an accident and tragedy strikes, as tragedy is wont to do. The B-side is concerned with life after the accident and Cesar’s further decent into alcoholism. And more sex, and more talking about penises.
Don’t get me wrong, this book is beautifully written. Its fluid style does pattern itself after a musical composition. I just found it a little bit hard to get through.
Something that I did appreciate about the book was Desi Arnez. For reasons both to complicated and vague, I don’t really like it when fictional books use real people as characters. However, I think that Hijuelos does a good job of capturing Arnez without trying to have his characters interact with him very much. He leaves him as he is: a plot device. I also appreciate the fact that what interaction does take place is with Arnez and not the more famous Lucille Ball. The Castillo brothers couldn’t care less about Lucy—it’s Arnez who they admire and it’s Arnez who they play for and it is Arnez who invites them on the show and it Arnez who sends them Christmas cards. This single element struck me as the most truthful part of the story, the part that most mirrors life.
I feel that this synopsis might not be doing the book justice, but just as no two listeners will hear an album in the same way, no two readers will read a book in the same light.
Buy The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love on Amazon
If you like this book/author, you might like:
(my reviews in blue)
Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros
Jazz by Toni Morrison
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquival
Drown by Junot Diaz
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba by Tom Gjelton
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Dreaming in Cuban by Christine Garcia
Bodega Dreams by Ernesto Quinonez
Other works by Oscar Hijuelos:
Dark Dude
A Simple Habana Melody
Empress of the Splendid Season
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien
Mr. Ives’ Christmas
Our House in the Last World
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