Synopses & Reviews
"Savor the mysterious power of a master's pentimento." --Los Angeles Times
"It takes a lot of nerve and skill to pull off something as rich as Beautiful MarÍa of My Soul, but pull it off Hijuelos does." --Cleveland Plain Dealer
"I fell instantly in love with the glorious soul of Beautiful María of My Soul. Hijuelos has created and brought to life two beloved characters, a heart-stealing heroine and Havana during an epoch of changing fate." --Amy Tan, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club
In Beautiful María of My Soul, Oscar Hijuelos returns to the passionate tale he began twenty years ago in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.
María is the great Cuban beauty who stole musician Nestor Castillo's heart and broke it, inspiring him to write the Mambo Kings' biggest hit, "Beautiful María of My Soul.'" Now in her sixties and living as an exile in Miami, María remains a beauty, still capable of turning heads. But while she left Cuba decades ago, she has never forgotten Nestor. As she thinks back to her days--and nights--in Havana, an entirely new perspective on the Mambo Kings story unfolds. Beautiful María of My Soul is a stunning act of reinvention, and another contemporary classic from an extraordinarily talented writer.
Review
“I fell instantly in love with the glorious soul of Beautiful Maria of My Soul. Hijuelos has created and brought to life two beloved characters, a heart-stealing heroine and Havana during an epoch of changing fate.” Amy Tan, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife
Review
“Beautiful Maria is the Queen of the Mambo Kings! Oscar Hijuelos brings this magnificent character to life in this lyrical novel.” Gay Talese, author of A Writer’s Life
Review
"When Oscar Hijuelos' landmark novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, about two musician brothers -- Cesar and Nestor Castillo who move from Cuba to New York -- came out in 1990, it amazed many and raised the hackles of not a few. (But then, which ambitious work that aims to break new ground doesn't?) Readers who loved Mambo Kings applauded Hijuelos' deft and compassionate characterizations -- especially that of Cesar Castillo -- and the novel's lush and unconventional narrative style that echoes the music at the heart of the book. Critics complained that Cesar with his machismo was almost a stereotype, that the overly-detailed scenes of his sexual exploits detracted from the novel, and that the style was rambling and formless. However, fans of the book outnumbered the detractors, and Mambo Kings went on to win a Pulitzer.
Now, 20 years later, Hijuelos gives us a companion novel to Mambo Kings. Beautiful Maria of My Soul tells the story of the woman Nestor Castillo left behind in Cuba but could never forget, and for whom he wrote and rewrote, over a lifetime, his magnum opus. It is a risky undertaking -- readers are bound to compare the novels -- but a fascinating project, because Beautiful Maria gives us Maria's story in her own voice -- and, Rashomon-like, it turns out to be a very different story, indeed." Chitra Divakaruni, The Oregonian (read the entire Oregonian review)
Synopsis
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is a Pulitzer Prize-winning contemporary American classic. Now, in his new novel, Hijuelos returns to this indelible story, to tell it from the point of view of its beloved heroine, Maria.
Synopsis
The Pulitzer Prize-winning
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is a contemporary American classic, a novel that still captures the imagination twenty years after its first publication. And now, in
Beautiful Maria of My Soul, Oscar Hijuelos returns to the story, but tells it from the point of view of its beloved heroine, Maria.
She’s the great Cuban beauty, the woman who stole musician Nestor Castillo’s heart and broke it, inspiring him to write the Mambo Kings’ biggest hit, “Beautiful Maria of My Soul.” Here, in Hijuelos’s dazzling new stand-alone novel, she finally takes the spotlight.
Now in her early sixties and living in Miami with her pediatrician daughter, Teresa, Beautiful Maria still turns heads. Having left Cuba decades before, she has gone on with her life, but has never forgotten Nestor, and as she thinks back to her days — and nights — in Havana, an entirely new perspective on the Mambo Kings story unfolds. Beautiful Maria of My Soul is a stunning feat of reimagination, another contemporary classic from an extraordinarily talented writer.
About the Author
Oscar Hijuelos, the son of Cuban immigrants, was in New York City in 1951. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. His novels--Mambo Kings, Our House in the Last World, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien, Mr. Ives' Christmas, Empress of the Splendid Season, and A Simple Habana Melody--have been translated into twenty-five languages.