Oscar Hijuelos' 'Beautiful Maria': Love hurts
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY
Oscar Hijuelos’ new novel is the literary version of a bolero, a Spanish love ballad, filled with passion and longing, sonorous with violins.
He has been there before. In 1990, Hijuelos, a son of Cuban immigrants, became the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his debut novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. The 1992 film starred Antonio Banderas in his first English-language role. It's the story of two brothers, musicians who left pre-Castro Cuba in the mid-'50s. After an appearance on I Love Lucy (which co-starred Lucille Ball’s husband, Desi Arnaz, a Cuban bandleader), they become one-hit wonders in the USA.
Their hit song, a bolero of lost love, was titled Beautiful Maria of My Soul. The film version of the song is performed in Spanish by Banderas and in English by the group Los Lobos.
Hijuelos's new novel of the same name retells that story through the eyes, ears and tears of "the lady behind a famous song," Maria Garcia y Cifuentes. The novel is more than a sequel and can be read on its own. But it's a mixed success.
Its plot is familiar: A poor, illiterate but beautiful teenager from the country moves to the big city (Habana), becomes a nightclub dancer and learns that men often say one thing and do another.
Hijuelos endlessly describes Maria's "irresistible body." And when she gazes in a mirror, Hijuelos writes: "If that mirror were a man, it would have been salivating; if it were a carpet, it would have taken flight; if it had been a pile of wood it would have burst into flame, so lovely was Maria."
But in love, Maria chooses poorly. She settles for a rich, abusive gangster over the love of her life, a struggling trumpet player, Nestor Castillo (played by Banderas in the film version, The Mambo Kings). In rejecting his marriage proposal, Maria says, "I just don't want to be a poor woman all my life."
Years later, after Maria has fled Castro's Cuba and Nestor has married another woman, they meet in New York. Between epic sex, Nestor tells Maria: "I love you because you're mi cubanita. I hate you because of what you have done to my heart."
Despite her looks and sexual talents, Maria isn't an interesting enough character to sustain a novel. But Hijuelos rescues the story with a daring and playful move near the end.
Maria, now middle-aged but still a looker, and her dutiful daughter, a pediatrician in Miami, read a novel titled — you guessed it —The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. They meet its author, named Oscar Hijuelos, whom Maria thinks is "too Americanized" but "a decent enough fellow," if "more Fred Mertz than Desi Arnaz."
And they see the movie with mixed emotions. Maria likes that she is played by "the gorgeous" Talia Soto.
But in the end, neither the movie nor the novel-within-a novel can capture her real love story. Maria does that for herself — in verse that's "nothing more than songs of love."
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/reviews/2010-07-08-hijuelosrev08_ST_N.htm?csp=Books
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