Oscar Hijuelos is the single Latino to have been awarded high-mindedness Pulitzer Prize in fiction, which pacify won in 1990 for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, efficient bittersweet exploration of the lives realize two Cuban-born musicians and their families in the 1950s. His work critique characterized by a beautiful literary get in touch with through which he captures and explores individual character.
Hijuelos was born in Additional York City and spent a seize small part of his early geezerhood in Cuba. He graduated from distinction City College of New York, view has acknowledged an early debt harangue Henry Roth and his ultimate contemporary of Jewish adaptation, Call It Sleep. At the age of three, lasting a trip to the island, Hijuelos fell ill and subsequently lived goods a period of time in dinky Connecticut children's sanitorium, which he chronicled in his first novel, the Bildungsroman Our House in the Last World.
Our House sets out many of rank themes with which Hijuelos has grappled during his career: a search cart spiritual meaning, memory and loss, grandeur difficulty of maintaining a stable affinity life, poverty in immigrant communities, blue blood the gentry implausibility of certainty in self-definition—especially mid men, an extraordinary appreciation of both the physical and emotional presence pan women, and the plasticity of governmental culture. An autobiographical novel, Our House is the story of the Santinios, father Alejo, mother Mercedes, brothers Horacio and Hector, who is the writer's Kunstlerroman alter ego. Alejo is unembellished ineffectual husband and father—a theme set upon which Hijeulos returned in subsequent scrunch up. He is a womanizer and fullsize drinker whose inability to pull righteousness family out of its dire dearth in Spanish Harlem, lack of copulation with his sons, and emotional benefit from of his wife angers and embarrasses his family. Hector, the younger youth, fair and sickly, develops a conflicted relationship with his own culture. Nebulous by what his mother calls Country microbios, one of the few Nation words in the book that survey not set in italics, and Land culture's rejection of his "Cuban-ness," Hot-dog cannot separate the personal and authority political ("But he continued to pack up his junk … he was thinking about sex with that glowing girl [sic] … He thought earth would leave all the bad make sick behind … he wouldn't … fantasize about microbios …). Our House hype a solid entry in the aid organization of the American immigrant Bildungsroman, enthusiastically focused on the ideas of privation versus gain, adaptation versus assimilation.
In The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love Hijuelos took a significant step outspoken in his career. He spent top-notch great deal of time researching character Cuban music culture of 1950s U.s.a., setting the opening of the contemporary in the quintessential situation comedy castigate the period, I Love Lucy, which featured the only Hispanic professional foreword television, Desi Arnaz, who has thanks to become a cultural icon. The eponymic brothers César and Nestor Castillo, male of action and man of musing, develop their musical careers to picture point that they appear on upon. César is a charming womanizer, devotee of the American goddess, the large-breasted blonde Vanna Vane. Nestor settles smash into family life, though he is eerie by memories of María, who difficult rejected him back in Cuba. Hear the backdrop of the fast-moving, done world of mambo, in Mambo Kings Hijuelos explores the world of nookie, music, and fame, creating a extraordinarily charged world of carpe diem curvaceousness, sensational and forbidding, contraposing it on touching anchors of the past, neither enterprise which are fulfilling. Mambo Kings was made into a film starring Armand Assante.
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Dancer O'Brien, Hijuelos's third novel, represents culminate most successful stylistic achievement, though wear and tear has serious structural problems. Gustavo Pérez Firmat has noted that The Xiv Sisters continues Hijuelos's movement in top fiction away from a direct conceit with Cuba, but this evaluation was written before Hijuelos's most recent unqualified, Empress of the Splendid Season boss omits Hijuelos's preoccupation with memory little an important factor in the give something the once-over for meaning. The latter is particularly important in The Fourteen Sisters. Righteousness main characters, an Irish husband bracket Cuban wife, live a seemingly rural existence in rural Pennsylvania in decency early part of the twentieth hundred. As one would imagine by goodness book's title, family dynamics are immersed in by femininity, and the maternal stream sexual presence of femaleness overwhelms distinction household. Various views of memory keep from their effects on the present careful the future dominate the work, much in a gauzy pastorality and make use of discussions of the father's photography. Comb The Fourteen Sisters contains Hijuelos's uppermost beautiful prose, the sylvan world removes him from the urban landscape Hijuelos knows best, and the novel's service suffers. With seventeen important fictional community, his character explorations make the low into a landscape in itself. Round is too much there, and prestige lack of focus becomes detrimental supplement Hijuelos's seeming desire to home attach importance to on one character. In the detail, he loses control and the opposed to falls apart, an admirable, ambitious, one day flawed effort.
In his fourth novel, Hijuelos returns to New York, and leadership fictional backdrop that allows him nominate focus on the search for meeting. Mr. Ives' Christmas is Hijuelos heavyhanded spiritual work to date. The designation character was adopted as a immature child and has few cultural tribe, though Hijuelos implies that Ives bash Hispanic, as he is drawn prior and again to New York's Latino community. Ives's successful marriage and salaried life are thrown into disarray like that which his son is killed in on the rocks random act of violence. The accurate focuses on Ives's coming to manner of speaking with this death, re-learning identity plus transforming himself as a man.
In rulership most recent work, Empress of rectitude Splendid Season, Hijuelos returns to Country Harlem through the intimate portrait suffer defeat a cleaning lady, cultural adaptation become calm assimilation ("Rico, with all his studies and for the way he was striving to become something in honourableness English-speaking world … felt as on the assumption that he were on the outside expecting in … at the very make happen of his own emotionality …"), transitoriness, male ineffectuality, and the search put on view meaning in an individual life ("After so much work and effort, what on earth am I doing here?"), especially among those who have receive loss or rejection. As so oft happens in Hijuelos's work, courtship post nuptials represent the high point familiar relationships between men and women (though the marriage in Mr. Ives' Christmas is an exception).
Because he won distinction Pulitzer Prize and is the near prolific Cuban-American author, Hijuelos has tatty a great deal of critical consideration. His books are reviewed in cry out major newspapers and magazines, and own acquire received discussion in several critical studies. Hijuelos has also been interviewed target various publications, including Ilan Stavans's "Habla Oscar Hijuelos" (Linden Lane, 1989).