"It's 1949. Two young Cuban musicians make their way up from Havana to the grand stage of New York. It is the era of the mambo, and the Castillo brothers, workers by day, become by night stars of the dance halls, where their orchestra plays the lush, sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of Mambo Kings. This is their moment of youth-- a golden time that thirty years later will be remembered with nostalgia and deep affection. In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos has created a rich and enthralling novel about passion and loss and memory and desire."
This book was a vivid portrayal of a certain era in a certain place through a certain man's eyes. Oscar Hijuelos took the idea that in your last moments your life flashes before you to heart, and created a wildly detailed and beautifully illustrated trip down the memory lane of one Cesar Castillo, a Cuban musician living out his days in a New York City pulsing with mambo and life.
To be honest, this book took me quite awhile to get through. There isn't a driving plot line that makes you want to know what happens next; instead, each chapter presents an intricate vignette of actions, emotions, and thoughts, and the memories don't necessarily come in order. What I realized towards the end of the book, though, is why the scenes weren't shown chronologically. The book really only takes place in a couple hours of Cesar's life, as he's living out his last moments in a room in the Hotel Splendour, with a record player by his side spinning out the music of his youth. So when a song comes on, it's like opening a time capsule: everything this man experienced relating to that song comes rushing back as clearly as if it happened yesterday-- and the songs aren't chronological. It's a feeling I can personally relate to, as I think most people can.
What I liked a lot about the book was that, even though Cesar is remembering certain things, the author provides you with information that Cesar may not know. So these characters Cesar interacts with, you know their story and their thoughts, and they become a rounded person. In terms of that, I thought there was amazing character development in the story. Something I also found interesting was how no one character would be good or bad, since their intentions were all laid bare to the reader. The author was very blatant about how people used eachother, not necessarily malevolently, but simply because that's what people do. Cesar himself was an interesting man to consider. He drank a lot, he smoked, he was a complete womanizer, and though yet given these facts you would jump to the conclusion he was a bad man, or maybe emotionally closed off, as the stereotype is, Hijuelos gave him generosity, a love of family and music, redeeming qualities that in the end made him neither a good, nor a bad person-- because in real life, good and bad people don't exist. There are only good and bad qualities, and the balance therein.
The reason I picked this book up in the first place was that it was about the music scene in the mid- twentieth century, particularly the Cuban music. I love books that work in history and real settings, because you learn so much while reading them, and understand even more because you have context. Reading this book, I learned an amazing amount about New York, mambo, Cuban immigrants, and more, and while I had heard about Fidel Castro in Cuba, this book taught me about the effect it had on Cubans and the different views they had- something I would never learn in history books. I liked how real people and places were worked in- the main characters met the likes of Perez Prado, Paquito di Rivera, and Desi Arnaz, and integrating such real-life names gave the book a sense of reality as well; it was interesting to be listening to the exact songs mentioned while reading about them.
One of the few things I didn't necessarily enjoy about this book was how graphic it was. It made a point of questioning the difference/ boundary between lust and love, but I feel that it could have made that point with less imagery--I felt like it held up the story sometimes. However, it did round out that theme well in the end, giving no clear answer and leaving you questioning more than ever.
There was no doubt this book was well- written, and although it wasn't a page-turner I enjoyed my time reading it- Hijuelos is a master of imagery and his sentences are beautiful in their own right, rich in color and emotion. I would recommend this book to music-lovers and history buffs and anyone looking for a little romance.
There was a movie adaptation made of this book in 1992 that I'm looking forward to watching now that I finished the book. Review to come!
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