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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Lawrence Public Library | BIO HIJ | 31549004280797 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | 92 HIJUELOS | 32128002843192 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
The beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist turns his pen to the real people and places that have influenced his life and, in turn, his literature. Growing up in 1950's working-class New York City to Cuban immigrants, Hijuelos journey to literary acclaim is the evolution of an unlikely writer.
Oscar Hijuelos has enchanted readers with vibrant characters who hunger for success, love, and self-acceptance. In his first work of nonfiction, Hijuelos writes from the heart about the people and places that inspired his international bestselling novels.
Born in Manhattan's Morningside Heights to Cuban immigrants in 1951, Hijuelos introduces readers to the colorful circumstances of his upbringing. The son of a Cuban hotel worker and exuberant poetry- writing mother, his story, played out against the backdrop of an often prejudiced working-class neighborhood, takes on an even richer dimension when his relationship to his family and culture changes forever. During a sojourn in pre-Castro Cuba with his mother, he catches a disease that sends him into a Dickensian home for terminally ill children. The yearlong stay estranges him from the very language and people he had so loved.
With a cast of characters whose stories are both funny and tragic, Thoughts Without Cigarettes follows Hijuelos's subsequent quest for his true identity into adulthood, through college and beyond-a mystery whose resolution he eventually discovers hidden away in the trappings of his fiction, and which finds its most glorious expression in his best-known book, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love . Illuminating the most dazzling scenes from his novels, Thoughts Without Cigarettes reveals the true stories and indelible memories that shaped a literary genius.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A modest yet inspired look back at his Manhattan upbringing by Cuban immigrants takes Pulitzer Prize-winning 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. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Pulitzer Prizewinning 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 driftedaimlessly through Harlem's schools, finding himself in and out of a variety of scrapesfighting, 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 eraVonnegut, Mailer, Gardner, Irving. His adolescent memories percolate with sexwith 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 withthe publication of Mambo Kings, its wild reception and its amazing aftermathand with a stirring condemnation of a literary world that ignores Latino writers.Unevenbut with peerless evocations of people and of a struggle to find a voice.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 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 mother's 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 father's joie de vivre and his overprotective mother's poetic soul. Its very lack of artifice gives this quiet, thoughtful memoir its subtle power.--Ott, Bil. Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love) proves himself again with his autobiography, a memoir of childhood and early adulthood and a tribute to his father, who died early of heart failure induced by heavy smoking. Hijuelos was born in New York City in 1951, the second son of Cuban immigrants: his father a campesino, his mother from the impoverished upper class. The author's contrast between the richness of Cuban culture and hard times in America is striking, especially the angry brutality of teens from poor working-class families in tenement New York. Hijuelos documents what American teenagers faced in the late 1960s-both the escapades they enjoyed and the injustices they suffered-and does not shun the explicit. Readers will squirm at his description of the slaughter of a pig, be appalled at the callousness of staff at the children's hospital where he convalesced from nephritis, and wish to look away from sexual details of friends-and his parents. Hijuelos admits that his profuse writing style stemmed from desires to remember his father. VERDICT Readers who enjoyed Hijuelos's novels will enjoy his memoir, a revelation of the personal sources of most of his fiction.-Nedra Crowe-Evers, Sonoma Cty. Lib., Santa Rosa, CA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| A Prelude of Sorts | p. xiii |
| Part 1 The Way Some Things Worked Out | |
| Chapter 1 When I Was Still Cuban | p. 3 |
| Chapter 2 A Few Notes on My Past | p. 53 |
| Chapter 3 Some Moments of Freedom | p. 99 |
| Chapter 4 Childhood Ends | p. 127 |
| Part 2 What Happened Afterward | |
| Chapter 5 Getting By | p. 177 |
| Chapter 6 My Two Selves | p. 193 |
| Chapter 7 My Life on Madison Avenue | p. 235 |
| Chapter 8 Out House in the Last World | p. 267 |
| Chapter 9 Roma | p. 289 |
| Chapter 10 Another Book | p. 323 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 369 |