This award-winning first novel from the author of the National Book Award nominee The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love was applauded by the New York Times Book Review as "a novel of great warmth and tenderness . . . a virtuoso writing that describes immigrant life in New York . . . a loving and deeply felt tribute".
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This award-winning first novel from the author of the National Book Award nominee The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love was applauded by the New York Times Book Review as "a novel of great warmth and tenderness . . . a virtuoso writing that describes immigrant life in New York . . . a loving and deeply felt tribute".
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Very Good. Very Good condition. A copy that may have a few cosmetic defects. May also contain a few markings such as an owner's name, short gifter's inscription or light stamp.
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Near Fine. First edition thus. Pictorial wrappers. Textblock edges moderately foxed, a few spots in the text, else a clean, near fine copy. Signed by the author on the title page.
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Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Covers edgeworn, lt scratched. Front cover & 1st few pages have two tiny punctures, not affecting inside text; else clean & tight. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. Audience: General/trade.
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.
