I don’t think I have completed and hated a book as thoroughly as I hated Oscar Hijuelos’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
- The two main characters. The Mambo Kings are two brothers who emigrate from Cuba to the United States. Nestor, by far the more interesting of the two characters, is either depressed or just lovelorn, and is dead before the book’s midpoint. Cesar, the older brother, is dissolute, obsessed with his penis, drunk nearly all of the time, and depressing as hell as he approaches his own death.
- The sex. I don’t mind if there’s sex in a novel as long as it’s well-written and not gratuitous, but this entire book was full of passages that would have won the Bad Sex in Fiction award had it existed at the time of the book’s publication. The novel must hold the record for the most uses of the word “pubic” in any publication that isn’t sold with a black wrapper around it. Hijuelous treats us to images like “the head of his penis weeping semen tears;” a woman’s “bad habit of yanking hard on his quivering testicles at the moment of his climax;” almost clinical descriptions of straight-up, oral, and anal sex; and – most disturbing of all – a reference to Cesar thinking about being in his mother’s womb while he performs oral sex on women.
- The story – or lack thereof. This isn’t about the rise and fall of the brothers’ band, called the Mambo Kings. When Nestor dies, the band dies; the book is almost two separate novels cobbled together, although neither would have been much better had it stood alone. It’s not about Cesar’s descent into a physical condition that matches his broken emotional state, or his lifelong struggle to overcome the abuse he suffered as a child at his father’s hands. It’s not about Nestor’s depression or melancholy, since he’s dead before we get much insight into that. It’s about Cesar whoring and drinking and eating his way through middle age into an early death.
The best explanation for this awful mess that I could conceive is that Hijuelos was trying to offer some sort of meditation on mortality, how potentially short our lives are (Nestor) or how we might look back when at death’s door and consider and reconsider our actions (Cesar). What we get, instead, is a catalog of Cesar’s sexual exploits and regular references to his acid reflux. Hijuelos even manages to make food boring, with lists of foods at the huge meals the Cuban brothers would eat but none of the descriptive language needed to bring those foods to life – although, given the crude and methodical descriptions Hijuelos gives us of sex acts, perhaps we should be thankful that he didn’t ruin food for his readers as well.
I have actually seen the 1992 adaptation, The Mambo Kings, starring a then-unknown-in-America Antonio Banderas as Nestor, but the film was very loosely based on the book, and the interpretation of what comes after Nestor’s death bears little relation to Hijuelos’ text. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Next up: Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade
Hey klaw, does .260-27-85 sound about right for Ludwick in 09?
Keith, those are some awesome tags.
BTW, how well do you think the Pulitzer Prize committee “performs”? Somewhere between NARAS and whoever chooses the Oscars?
_Matador_ was 1986. That’s when Banderas was unknown. By 1992, he was a star. A minor star, but a star nonetheless. That he later got even bigger does not diminish what he had accomplished then.
Stick to your knitting, baseball man.
WCW: According to IMDB, Banderas didn’t appear in an English-language movie before Mambo Kings. I said he was unknown in America; he was a star in Spain, and perhaps in Latin America, but he was unknown in the U.S. I don’t see how Banderas’ role in Matador, which IMDB has grossing $200,000 in the U.S., is supposed to be evidence to the contrary.
Aaron: Of the nineteen winners I’ve read, I’d say I loved or really liked ten of them, but I think their more recent selections have shown a slight bias towards certain themes or topics that doesn’t dovetail as well with my interests as earlier winners did.
ess: No idea, sorry. I don’t really think about players in fantasy terms.
Except Grady Sizemore. He’s gorgeous!!!
Entertaining review. Probably more entertaining than the book itself.
Hopefully a comment like this doesn’t get me banned off the site, but since you’re a punctuation guy, you should know that quotation marks go on the inside of semicolons.
Keith, you watch any of the new Food Network shows? You might liked “Chopped,” which is basically the “Quick Fire” challenge from “Top Chef” narrowed down to one episode. I also caught the Guy-hosted, home-cook-populated show (“Ultimate Recipe Showdown”?) and they had a 75-year-old ex-plastic surgeon who’s now legally blind on… and I have to say he made two tasty-looking burgers. I had heard the show was incredibly annoying, but I thought it was pretty good.
baileywalk: You’re absolutely right, and yet, I had never heard that before (about semicolons). Thanks.
I completely agree. I’m halfway through *Mambo Kings* and I keep reading the cover to make sure it really says Pultizer Prize on it… You’re right, it’s ruined sex for me and perpetuated every Latino/Latina stereotype out there… Argh.