America, the ?last world?, holds out many promises to the Santinio family from Cuba. For Alejo, the father, it means escape from the dreary farm of San Pedro and, perhaps, a business of his own. For Mercedes, his wife, America is the last of the material worlds. Still she has had other lives and will lives again, after her death. For the sons, Horacio and Hector, the ?last world? is not only New York, but also Cuba - a place of sensuous beauty, fragrance and ancestral memory. Filled with ghosts and the delicate presence ...
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America, the ?last world?, holds out many promises to the Santinio family from Cuba. For Alejo, the father, it means escape from the dreary farm of San Pedro and, perhaps, a business of his own. For Mercedes, his wife, America is the last of the material worlds. Still she has had other lives and will lives again, after her death. For the sons, Horacio and Hector, the ?last world? is not only New York, but also Cuba - a place of sensuous beauty, fragrance and ancestral memory. Filled with ghosts and the delicate presence of flowers, the sensuality of Cuban rhythms and the reality of Manhattan, Our House in the Last World is a work of beauty about people stranded between two cultures whose search for a better life remains unfulfilled.
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First U. K. Edition. Wraps. 8vo. Illustrated wraps. Large format paperback-'Paperback original. ' Signed on title page. ISBN: 1-85242-105-3 Pages: 240 Fine.
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Fine. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 272 p. In Stock. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Brand New, Perfect Condition, allow 4-14 business days for standard shipping. To Alaska, Hawaii, U.S. protectorate, P.O. box, and APO/FPO addresses allow 4-28 business days for Standard shipping. No expedited shipping. All orders placed with expedited shipping will be cancelled. Over 3, 000, 000 happy customers.
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Before Oscar Hijuelos became the first Hispanic writer to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his 1989 novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, he wrote a sad, lovely first novel, Our House in the Last World, which tells the story of the Santinio family's migration from Cuba to America's terminus, spanning World War II to the end of the last century. In retrospect, the novel recounts the father Alejo Santinio's wooing of the delicate Mercedes Sorrea, a compassionate and clairvoyant woman and Alejo's dream of riches which propels them to New York, told from younger son Hector's outsider perspective.
Alejo finds work as a waiter, smelling of meat and blood, squanders opportunities, and falls into alcoholic stupors and infidelities, beating his sons. Mercedes lapses into a dreamy nostalgia for her hometown Holguin and remembrances of her father's ghost. Their American-born son Hector contracts "microbios," which lands him in a hospital for a year and "cures" him of Spanish. He speaks only "American" now. His dream of Cuba is a litany of sensuous tastes: "eating trees. . .flowers. . .kisses. . .plantains." Mercedes's memories grow ever more wistful, effacing the unpleasant episodes, as she impresses on her eldest son Horacio their aristocratic lineage, and denies the family's poverty in America.
Hector's tie to Cuba is at once loving and debilitating--his mother suspects he first contracted his illness there--and gives him early intimations of mortality and death. Spanish becomes "the language of memory, of violence and sadness." His isolation from "children, from Cubanness, from health" becomes normalized. Hector's identity is bifurcated; he loves and fears Cuba, yet is sick of being Americanized, wanting to "crawl out of his skin." Visiting Miami, he longs for the suavity of the young Cubans there. In the story of Alejo and his two sons, the novel recounts painful rites of manhood, loyalty, and revenge.
At Alejo's funeral, the white blossoms are a symbol that connects the present with Mercedes' memory of her childhood in Holguin. Hector is inhabited by his father's presence "like microbios." The novel concludes with Mercedes' monologue in which she fantasizes Alejo and herself as attendants to Queen Isabella and Columbus in Spain. Thus the royal past permeates the family's present, mythologizing and ennobling their troubled lives. In their association with Columbus, the Santinio family are linked to the original immigrants to the New World.
While the recurrent images of ghosts, butterflies, mirrors, blossoms, and Mercedes's spiritualist trances are magic realist touches, at heart Hijuelos is an old-fashioned social realist . Our House in the Last World is a haunting, deeply affecting novel.
