A first-generation Cuban son comes of age in 1940s New York in the debut--and most autobiographical--novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. New York City, 1944. Hector Santinio is the younger son of Cuban immigrants Alejo and Mercedes. The fraught family of four shares their small, modest apartment with extended relatives in raucous Spanish Harlem. There are parties, dancing, and dreamy, homesick storytelling about their idyllic island. But life's realities are nevertheless harsh ...
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A first-generation Cuban son comes of age in 1940s New York in the debut--and most autobiographical--novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. New York City, 1944. Hector Santinio is the younger son of Cuban immigrants Alejo and Mercedes. The fraught family of four shares their small, modest apartment with extended relatives in raucous Spanish Harlem. There are parties, dancing, and dreamy, homesick storytelling about their idyllic island. But life's realities are nevertheless harsh in the Santinio family's adoptive land. Mercedes decides to take Hector and his brother Horacio to visit relatives in Cuba to better know her culture. While there, the three-year-old Hector contracts a serious illness that leads to his terrifying year-long hospitalization and recovery back in the United States. Caught between his overly protective mother's fears for his health and his father's macho behavior and disappointments, the adolescent Hector struggles to understand his identity and place in the world. In the aftermath of his father's untimely passing, Hector staggers towards adulthood, haunted by notions of inadequacy and sadness and wrestles with the truth of his father as a deeply flawed but honorable man. This is a jewel-box of a tale whose treasure is the hope and yearning of immigrants in America. Includes a Reading Group Guide.
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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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PLEASE NOTE, WE DO NOT SHIP TO DENMARK. New Book. Shipped from UK in 4 to 14 days. Established seller since 2000. Please note we cannot offer an expedited shipping service from the UK.
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Good. Minimal signs of wear. Corners and cover may show wear. May contain highlighting and or writing. May be missing dust jacket. May not include supplemental materials. May be a former library book.
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.
