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 ...
Read More
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.
Read Less
Add this copy of Our House in the Last World to cart. $8.99, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Baltimore rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Halethorpe, MD, UNITED STATES, published 1983 by Persea Books, Incorporated.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very good. A copy that has been read, but remains in excellent condition. Pages are intact and are not marred by notes or highlighting, but may contain a neat previous owner name. The spine remains undamaged. An ex-library book and may have standard library stamps and/or stickers. At ThriftBooks, our motto is: Read More, Spend Less.
Add this copy of Our House in the Last World to cart. $9.68, like new condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Reno rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Reno, NV, UNITED STATES, published 1983 by Persea Books.
Add this copy of Our House in the Last World to cart. $9.68, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Dallas rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dallas, TX, UNITED STATES, published 1983 by Persea Books.
Add this copy of Our House in the Last World to cart. $9.68, very good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Baltimore rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Halethorpe, MD, UNITED STATES, published 1983 by Persea Books.
Add this copy of Our House in the Last World to cart. $9.68, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Dallas rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dallas, TX, UNITED STATES, published 1983 by Persea Books.
Add this copy of Our House in the Last World to cart. $9.98, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Reno rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Reno, NV, UNITED STATES, published 2017 by Persea Books.
Add this copy of Our House in the Last World to cart. $9.99, like new condition, Sold by I Am Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Minnetonka, MN, UNITED STATES, published 1983 by Persea Books.
Add this copy of Our House in the Last World to cart. $10.03, good condition, Sold by One Planet Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Columbia, MO, UNITED STATES, published 1983 by Persea Books.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Good. Ships in a BOX from Central Missouri! May not include working access code. Will not include dust jacket. Has used sticker(s) and some writing and/or highlighting. UPS shipping for most packages, (Priority Mail for AK/HI/APO/PO Boxes).
Add this copy of Our House in the Last World to cart. $10.24, very good condition, Sold by HPB-Emerald rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dallas, TX, UNITED STATES, published 1983 by Persea.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very good. Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and may have some shelf wear or limited writing. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority!
Add this copy of Our House in the Last World to cart. $10.50, very good condition, Sold by HPB-Diamond rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dallas, TX, UNITED STATES, published 1991 by Persea Books.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Very good. Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and may have some shelf wear or limited writing. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority!
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.
