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It is 1947, and Israel Levis, a Cuban composer whose life had once been a dream of music, love, and sadness, returns to Cuba after being mistakenly imprisoned during the Nazi occupation of France.
When Levis arrives back in Habana, his mind returns to an unrequited romance with the alluring Rita Valladares, a singer for whom Levis had written his most famous song, "Rosas Puras." This 1928 composition became the most famous rumba in the world and changed American and European tastes in music and dance forever.
A love story — of art, family, and country — A Simple Habana Melody is a virtuoso performance from one of our most important writers.
The Barnes & Noble Review
With an uncanny understanding of the intricacies of the human spirit, Oscar Hijuelos -- Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love -- creates beautifully flawed, emotionally fragmented characters who are at once passionate and sexless, impenetrable and vulnerable, godlike and meaningless. Hijuelos's melancholic, multilayered A Simple Habana Melody paints a portrait of another conflicted character whose self-centeredness, myopia, and unrequited passion wildly intertwine to stymie a promising career and hopes of happiness.
It is 1947, and Israel Levis, a once world-famous musical composer, has just returned to his native Cuba after imprisonment in a WWII Nazi death camp. When the corpulent, gentlemanly Levis becomes snuggled safely once again into his native land, his thoughts rush back to his longtime secret love, Rita Valladares, an alluring singer-siren for whom he wrote his simple yet infectious 1928 song "Rosas Puras" ("Pretty Roses"). As the narrative sweeps through 1930s Paris and the Nazi occupation of France, we see how Levis's universally appealing rumba, like his undying -- and unfulfilled -- desire for Valladares, remains a pure constant even as his selfish devotion to music, excessive pride, vague homosexual yearnings, and indifference to his own drunkenness block the maestro from seriously pursuing creative and personal happiness.
With the bustling creative communities of Paris and Havana of the 1930s as a backdrop, Hijuelos's vivid storytelling paints an achingly romantic portrait of artistic waste, sexual restraint, and stunted intellectual inspiration. A Simple Habana Melody is a complex, atmospheric, and elegant work that beguiles even as it leaves the reader with puzzling questions about the nature of passion and devotion. (Will Romano)
Oscar Hijuelos was born of Cuban parentage in New York City in 1951. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. His five previous novels have been translated into twenty-five languages.
Oscar Hijuelos nació de padres cubanos en Nueva York en 1951. Sus otras novelas incluyen Mr. Ives' Christmas, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien, Our House in the Last World y A Simple Havana Melody (Una Sencilla Melodía Habanera). Vive en Nueva York.
And the language in Hijuelos' novels is indeed as poetic as the language of his Irish heroes. When The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, the story of two Cuban brothers who move to Spanish Harlem in the 1950s to make their mark as singers, appeared in 1990, readers and critics waxed ecstatic about Hijuelos' writing.
Hijuelos, a second-generation Cuban-American who was born in New York City, writes about assimilation and identity, love and loss, and the power -- and pain -- of family life. In Our House in the Last World, Hijuelos' first book, he explores the world of memory and displacement, following the fortunes of a Cuban family transplanted to New York in the 1940s. In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, for which Hijuelos received the Pulitzer Prize, Hijuelos created the Castillo brothers, Nestor and Cesar. Their story was recounted through Cesar's memories and fantasies, as he lived out his last days in a seedy hotel. In researching the book, Hijuelos steeped himself in Latin music from the period and in his own remembrances of his childhood on Manhattan's 118th Street. The result is a highly charged yet tender distillation of past, suffused with a crystalline sense of detail that brings Nabokov to mind.
Hijuelos attributes some of this obsession with memory to his heritage. "Latins are predisposed to thinking about the past," he told the Times. "Catholicism has a lot to do with it because Catholicism is a contemplation of the past, of symbols that are supposed to be eternally present."
With The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien (1993), he took his exploration of memory in a different direction, telling the story from the perspectives of several female narrators, and stretching them across several generations. In 1999s Empress of the Splendid Season, he switched perspectives again for the story of a cleaning woman whose life is a stark counterpoint to that of her wealthy employer's. Three years later in A Simple Habana Melody, Hijuelos returned to "when the world was good," in 1920s Havana with a love story told by a Cuban composer whose infatuation inspires him to write the most famous song of his career.
A gaunt man walks the deck of the ocean liner that is taking him home to Cuba. He is sad and frail, saying little, eating less, politely nodding to his fellow passengers, many of whom know his name, even though they don't recognize his face or figure. Twenty-five years earlier this same man was famous throughout the world. He was corpulent, expansive, and cheerful. On any given night he could be found at a Habana nightclub enjoying a sumptuous meal, perhaps rising to entertain the crowd with one of his famous songs. Later he might visit a bordello, then return to his comfortable home and sleep soundly until the next afternoon.
The transformation of Israel Levis can be traced most directly to the years he spent in Buchenwald, where he "mistakenly" was sent by the Nazi forces occupying Paris. But Israel's spiritual journey is a decades-long process of reflection and self-examination that comes into full relief in this beautiful elegiac novel about identity, music, and faith. Along the way we are treated to a vibrant, fascinating portrait of Habana before and after the Second World War.
Born to an affluent, educated Habana family, Israel Levis was a musical prodigy, coddled and adored by his parents. He grew up believing that his talent was a gift from a benevolent God, whom he would one day meet in Heaven. As he grows older, Israel begins to encounter life's imperfections: his beloved sister dies young, and his father is killed in a tragic accident. He falls in love with a beautiful singer, yet cannot reveal his feelings to her. He is horrified to find himself attracted to other men, and represses these unseemly passions with visits toprostitutes.
By the time he reaches adulthood, Israel Levis is famous -- not just for his musical gifts, but also for his appetite for food, drink, and women; for his generosity, piousness, and devotion to his mother; and for his eccentric ways. A melody he composes on the fly becomes an international sensation, and his fame grows. As Habana suffers through a brutal dictatorship, Israel continues to live the life of a dandy, plagued by his unrequited desires, and only vaguely aware of the dangerous unrest that surrounds him.
Convinced, finally, that he is at risk in Cuba, Israel immigrates to Paris, where he is the toast of the town. Even as Hitler advances on the city, Israel continues to pursue his primary interests: music, food, and sex, with little thought to the changing world. It isn't until he is identified as Jew by the Nazis -- despite his exhortations of his Catholicism -- that he becomes fully aware of the horrors unfolding around him. Little by little the life that Israel so enjoyed slips away. He is shunned, derided, and eventually shipped off to Buchenwald where, along with thousands of others, he is stripped of his dignity, his identity, and eventually of his faith in God.
Until his imprisonment, Israel Levis would have considered himself a blessed man, convinced that God was watching over him and protecting him. Israel's relationship to God was not unlike a child worshiping a parent, wondering what that parent is truly like, but happy enough to accept his or her sovereignty without question. Once he is released, Israel has lost his voracious appetites. He feels betrayed by God, and remembers with humiliation the life he had before, consumed as it was with trivial and vain pursuits.
And so Israel returns to Habana a changed man. He is no longer certain of his faith, or even of the importance of his musical gift. His longings for food and drink, for women and men, have been replaced by an unsettling awareness that his life has been wasted. Where once he welcomed fame, he now shies away from the limelight, for if God fails to exist, then so must his talent. When at last he dies, Israel revisits his childhood, his fantasies and joys, his sorrows and disappointment. But most of all he wistfully remembers the Habana of his youth, when life -- and the world -- was good.
Questions for Discussion
About the Author
Oscar Hijuelos was born in New York City in 1951, the son of Cuban immigrants. He attended City College of New York where one of his instructors in the creative writing program was Donald Barthelme.
After leaving the university, Hijuelos wrote a number of short stories, some of which were included in The Best of Pushcart Press III anthology in 1978. One of his first professional works, "Columbus Discovering America," received an outstanding writer citation from Pushcart Press in 1978. The exposure from this award led to an Oscar Cintas fiction writing grant, a Breadloaf Writers Conference scholarship, and grants from the Creative Artists Programs Service and the Ingram Merrill Foundation.
Hijuelos published his first novel in 1983. Our House in the Last World examines the life of a Cuban immigrant family in America during the 1940s. Critics praised the novel as a warm and vibrant depiction of the family's experiences in America and noted that the work reflected a departure from other Cuban writers who often focused on the political struggles in Cuba or life in exile. In 1985 Hijuelos received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1989, he published his second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, which became a critical and popular success. It was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1989, as well as the National Book Award. A year later, the work earned Hijuelos the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction -- the first Hispanic American novelist to win the prize.
Hijuelos's third novel, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien, appeared in 1993. Hijuelos said that he wanted the novel "to portray a world in which women were very powerful. I took the idea of machismo and pushed it, getting inside the skin of the characters.... I wanted to look behind the basic images of women." It was followed in 1999 by his fourth novel, Mr. Ive's Christmas. Empress of the Splendid Season was his fifth novel. This book portrays the joys and frustrations of Lydia España, a Cuban émigré who works as a cleaning woman in Manhattan, while exploring stories of the secret lives she uncovers in her clients' apartments.
While writing is obviously a large part of his life, Oscar Hijuelos has a wide range of other interests, including music. In 1998, he appeared along with other prominent authors on a double-CD collection of 32 songs titled "Stranger Than Fiction." In addition, Hijuelos is a collector of old maps, turn-of-the-century books, and graphics.
Overview
It is 1947, and Israel Levis, a Cuban composer whose life had once been a dream of music, love, and sadness, returns to Cuba after being mistakenly imprisoned during the Nazi occupation of France.
When Levis arrives back in Habana, his mind returns to an unrequited romance with the alluring Rita Valladares, a singer for whom Levis had written his most famous song, "Rosas Puras." This 1928 composition became the most famous rumba in the world and changed American and European tastes in music and dance forever.
A love story — of art, family, and country — A Simple Habana Melody is a virtuoso performance from one of our ...