The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
by Oscar Hijuelos
Summary
Cesar and Nestor Castillo arrive in New York from Havana in 1949 and form a band. Cesar sings, drinks, and pursues every woman in the borough with enormous appetite and no cruelty. Nestor, the younger, plays trumpet and writes one song, Beautiful Maria of My Soul, about a woman he lost in Cuba, and then rewrites it another twenty one times because he cannot let her go.
Their moment arrives when Desi Arnaz sees them play and puts them on an episode of I Love Lucy as Ricky Ricardo's cousins from Cuba. They sing the song, in front of the largest audience in the country, and then it is over, and the rest of their lives are the years after that half hour.
The whole novel is framed by Cesar in 1980, old and unwell, alone in a room at the Hotel Splendour with a bottle of whisky and a box of the band's records, playing them one at a time.
Nestor's story ends early and badly, and the second half belongs to what Cesar does with thirty years of afterwards: superintendent of a building on La Salle Street, uncle to his brother's children, a man who was on television once and mentions it.
Hijuelos writes music better than almost anyone, describing what a mambo does to a room from inside the band, and he writes sex frankly and very often, which some readers find exhausting by the third hundred pages. The book is warm, physical and extremely sad about what it means to have peaked in public at twenty nine.
At about four hundred pages it moves in loops rather than a line, circling back to the same nights. Best for readers who want immigrant New York with the dance halls still open, and who do not mind a narrator whose appetites take up a great deal of room.
Historical Context & Significance
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Oscar Hijuelos became the first Hispanic writer to receive it.
He was born in New York in 1951 to Cuban parents from Holguin, worked in advertising while writing at night, and drew the mambo years from his father's world rather than his own.
The I Love Lucy sequence is invention built on fact: Desi Arnaz really did put Cuban musicians on American television weekly at a time when almost no other route existed. Arnaz appears as himself in the novel and receives one of its gentlest scenes.
Arne Glimcher filmed it in 1992 as The Mambo Kings, with Armand Assante as Cesar and Antonio Banderas as Nestor in his first English language role, and a stage musical followed in 2005, premiering in San Francisco but cancelled before it reached Broadway. Hijuelos died in 2013.