I just finished a remarkable novel the other night, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, by Oscar Hijuelos. The book is a slow burn of a novel about the life of a man (told as a series of memories as he looks back on his life during his last hours, in a seedy hotel in New York City) who, along with his brother, was once a major figure in Cuban music (particularly Mambo music) in the 1950s. Cesar Castillo remembers his childhood with his brother, Nestor, in Cuba, and he remembers the loves they had there before they came to New York, hopefully to establish a life and then move their families and their loved ones along later. Cesar and Nestor become musicians and their lives…well, their lives go on. I don’t want to say a whole lot more than that, because the book is as effective at showing life for what it is–a sequence of things that happen to us, few of which we have any control over–and there are turns along the way that we don’t see coming. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is not a novel that grabs right away…in fact, I was wondering if I’d bother finishing it just after fifty pages or so. But it grows in the mind, and by the time I was in the last hundred pages or so, I honestly couldn’t stop thinking about it. I read the book slowly, savoring as it went, enjoying Hijuelos’s chapter-less structure and his very long paragraphs, sometimes extending over several pages, and his long parenthetical asides as one of Cesar’s memories triggered another one, barely related, that took place at some total other point in his life.
The Castillo Brothers’ biggest hit is a song that Nestor writes about the love of his life, a woman he can’t forget even though she is back in Cuba (and their relationship didn’t work out anyway), named Maria. Nestor pens a song called “Beautiful Maria of My Soul”, and this song’s success marks their high point as a musical act and it also somewhat haunts Cesar for the rest of the novel. And thanks to the fact that the book was adapted for the screen in 1992, in a film simply called The Mambo Kings, we can hear the song. It is sung by Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas, who star in the film as Cesar and Nestor Castillo. I have never seen the film, but the song is quite good.
