Book review: 'Thoughts Without Cigarettes' by Oscar Hijuelos
July 31, 2011 | By Hector Tobar | Los Angeles Times
The 'Mambo Kings' Pulitzer winner draws us in to his world as he revisits his New York childhood filled with eclectic characters and his later literary blossoming.
Was there ever a time and place more alive and unpredictable than New York City in the middle decades of the 20th century?
Oscar Hijuelos was lucky enough to live there then, a son of Cuban immigrants. In his often deeply affecting memoir, "Thoughts Without Cigarettes," he describes the odd cast that called his West Harlem street home.
He had German and Irish best friends, jammed with black and Latino jazz musicians — and got mugged again and again. Every so often, the rocket engineer Wernher von Braun walked past his window.
It's a neighborhood where everyone came from somewhere else and was headed somewhere better. But young Oscar grows up without much ambition and distant from his Latino identity. Among other things, he doesn't feel he can rightfully call himself Cuban.
"Who and what am I? Why is it that I hate seeing what I see when I look in the mirror?" he asks.
It's an odd thing to hear from a writer who will eventually make so many Latino readers feel good about being Latino. But eventually, thinking and writing about his New York City period helps Hijuelos figure it all out.
"But don't you know?" a Cuban American therapist finally tells him. "Eres cubano. You're Cuban, after all."
"Thoughts Without Cigarettes" begins with the Hijuelos family's origins in provincial Cuba and their arrival in New York in the late 1940s. And it ends with Hijuelos' coronation in 1990 as the first Latino writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Every Latino writer published since (including this reviewer) owes Hijuelos a debt of gratitude — his work helped open the door of New York publishing to us.His memoir is both a coming-of-age story and a tale of literary awakening, and it contains many a melancholy and uplifting twist.
His personal recipe for success includes two essential ingredients: the forgiving and excellent New York public education system of the day, including the stellar faculty at the City College of New York; and Hijuelos' long struggle to decipher his cultural identity.
His parents hailed from Holguin in eastern Cuba. His father, Pascual, is a man of the countryside, his mother, Magdalena, the daughter of a déclassé family of artists and dreamers. In New York, Pascual finds work in the kitchen of the Biltmore Hotel.
At 4, the young Oscar is a fluent Spanish speaker — until he gets sick on a family visit to Cuba with his mother.
The trip provides him with his only concrete memories of the island, as a place of pepper trees and tarantulas.
But when he returns to New York, he's strangely listless. Diagnosed with a kidney disease, he's forced to spend a year separated from his family at a Connecticut hospital. Surrounded by English-speaking nurses, his Spanish withers away.
"[W]hat I would hear for years afterward from my mother," Hijuelos writes, "was that something Cuban had nearly killed me and, in the process of my healing, would turn my own 'Cubanness' into air."
When Oscar returns to West Harlem, he's placed on a strict diet. His peculiar torture is to live for years in an apartment replete with the aroma of fried plantains and spicy pork, while being forbidden to taste any of these Cuban delicacies.
Eventually, young Oscar escapes the attentions of his mother and turns West Harlem into his playground. His description of that community makes for exquisite reading, with everything from LSD to comic books to Puerto Rican conjunto musicians thrown in.
Sadly, a big chunk of the neighborhood is torn down in the mid-1960s to make way for an expansion of Columbia University. And Hijuelos himself is cast adrift after his father, a lifelong heavy drinker, dies suddenly. Years later, Hijuelos first finds writerly inspiration from a playwright who knew a thing or two about the bottle — Tennessee Williams.
He signs up for a writing class at City College. A single walk down the hallway at that school reveals the heady terrain he's entered, though Hijuelos is too callow to appreciate it then.
On his way to look for his first teacher — Donald Barthelme, the short-story writer — he walks past the offices of three professors: Joseph Heller, William S. Burroughs and Francine du Plessix Gray.
Under Barthelme's tutelage, Hijuelos begins to blossom. Eventually, he thinks about writing a novel, a long shot for any writer — and even more so for a young Latino in the 1970s.
"[I]t was a very rare thing to see published work by any members of that primitive tribe from our urban jungles known as los Latinos," Hijuelos writes. "I thought it would be years before I could write anything worthwhile. Even then, who out there would publish it?"
The book he writes, "Our House in the Last World," sells modestly but gets a strong review in the New York Times.
With that, Hijuelos has one foot tenuously in the door. He wins a fellowship in Rome, where he plugs away at snippets of a tale drawing on the lives of the Cuban musicians that circled in his West Harlem orbit.
Scrambling together his fragments, he sells "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love" to legendary editor Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. That disciplined, elegant novel will help bring the modern Latino experience into the mainstream of American letters.
"Mambo Kings" is a commercial and critical hit. But nothing prepares Hijuelos for the phone call he receives from FSG publisher Roger Straus after his whirlwind book tour is over.
"My boy, you've done it… You've won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction."
Moments later, Hijuelos has a vision that closes the circle of his family story and which provides a deeply moving capstone to his memoir.
In the years since "Mambo Kings," the American literary landscape has changed dramatically.
Spanish has flooded American speech, flowing freely and without boundaries in books by Latino writers. And in "Thoughts Without Cigarettes" Hijuelos can seem almost quaint as he provides instant translation to such basic Spanish phrases as "Me entiendes?"
But that's the smallest of quibbles. "Thoughts Without Cigarettes" is a wonderfully intimate epic and also an essential document of the evolution of American literature. It tells the story of an American neighborhood and of the young man who was born there, who looked inside himself and found books waiting to be written.
Tobar is a Times columnist and the author of "The Barbarian Nurseries," a novel to be published in October by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
hector.tobar@latimes.com
Excerpt: 'Thoughts Without Cigarettes: A Memoir'
by OSCAR HIJUELOS
June 21, 2011 5:24 PM
Chapter 1: When I Was Still Cuban
Pretend it's sometime in 1955 or 1956 and that you are hanging over the roof's edge of my building, as I often did as a teenager, looking down at the street some six stories below. You would have seen, on certain mornings, my mother, Magdalena, formerly of Holguin, Cuba, and now a resident of the "United Stays," pacing back and forth fitfully before our stoop, waiting for a car. She would have been eye-catching, even lovely, with her striking dark features and pretty face, her expression, however, somewhat gaunt. Muttering to herself, she would have had the jitters, not only from her inherently highstrung nature but also because she'd probably spent the night sitting up with my pop worrying about their youngest son — me.
As green and white transit buses came forlornly chugging up the hill along Amsterdam from 125th Street, she would have stood there, perhaps with my older brother, Jose, by her side, watching the avenue for a car to turn onto the street, all the while dreading what the day might hold for her. Sometimes it would have rained or it would have been brutally cold. Sometimes it would be sunny, or snow would be falling so daintily everywhere around her. She might call out to a friend to come down from one of the buildings nearby, say my godmother, Carmen, mi madrina, a red-haired cubana, with her flamenco dancer's face and intense dark eyes. Coming down in a bathrobe and slippers to reassure her, she'd tell my mother not to worry so much, it wasn't good for her after all — the kid would be fine. "Ojala," my mother, her stomach in knots, would answer, though always shaking her head.
A car would finally pull over to the curb. The driver, a friend of my father's, or someone he had paid, would take her either to 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, where she might catch a train, or directly up to Greenwich, Connecticut, where I, her five-year-old son, lay languishing in a hospital. Through the Bronx and over to the highway north to Connecticut they would go and, coming to that placid town, the kind of place she'd never have visited otherwise, enter a different world. In the spring, she'd ride along the loveliest of shadow-dappled streets, the sunlight shimmering through the leafy boughs of elm and oak trees overhead, as if they were passing through a corridor like one of the roads out of Havana; and in the winter, snow, in plump drifts and brilliant, would have been everywhere, so Christmas-y and postcard-pretty. After following her directions, which she would have recited carefully to the driver from a piece of paper — torn out of a composition notebook page or from a brown grocery bag — they would have found the hospital along King Street, off in its own meadow and reached by a winding flagstone driveway, the Byram Woods looming as a lovely view just nearby.
Each time she'd have to bring someone along to help her out with the nurses and staff. My mother had to. For what English she knew, even after some thirteen years in this country, consisted of only a few phrases and words, and even those were pronounced with her strong Cuban accent and the trepidations of a woman who, until then, had rarely ventured out from the insular immigrant's bubble of our household. It's possible that one of the Zabalas sisters, three schoolteacherly cubanas living over on 111th Street, who all spoke good English, accompanied her. Or perhaps my brother or my godfather, Horacio, a bank teller, went along. Still, even with that help, just to navigate the hospital's bureaucracy must have been a misery for her — and not only because she had to depend on someone to translate her exchanges with the ward personnel but because of her fears about what she might be told. In those days, the disease I suffered from, nephritis, or nee-free-tees, as she'd pronounce it, which is now easily treatable with a broad spectrum of drugs, was then often fatal to children. That thought alone must have kept her awake on many nights, and particularly so during the first six months of my stay, when, as a safeguard against my catching other infections, I wasn't allowed to see anyone at all.
As an aside, I will tell you that for years I didn't even know the hospital's name: A kind of chronic disinformation has always been a part of my family's life, and if I have only recently learned that institution's name, it's because, in tandem with this writing, I happened to mention to my brother how strange it was that, for all the times I had asked my mother about just where I had stayed, she never seemed able to come up with a name except to say, "fue alla en Connecticut."
He knew it, however, and it makes sense that this riddle, which would plague me for decades, would have a far less mysterious solution than I could have ever imagined: for that place turned out to be called, quite simply, the St. Luke's Convalescent Hospital.
A cousin, circa 1928, of its New York City namesake, where I had been taken first, the St. Luke's Convalescent Hospital consisted of a red-brick three-story structure with a white portico entranceway, and two adjacent, somewhat lower wings at either side. In the quaintness of its architecture, it suggested, from a distance, perhaps a plantation manor house. (This I know less from memory than from a postcard I recently saw of the place.) Somewhere inside the ward in which I stayed, with its locked doors and high windows, its smells of both medicine and Lysol, and its hums of pumping dialysis machines that gave off breathing sounds from down the hall, one found the visitors' room, whose main feature was a glass partition that had a speaking grille. A nurse would bring me in from the ward, where a dozen other beds both emptied and filled with children monthly, and there behind that visitors' room partition, eyes blinking, I would sit, while my mother, the nice-looking lady on the other side, no doubt tried to make friendly conversation with the five-year-old boy, her son, the delicate-looking little blond with the bloated limbs, who, as the months passed, seemed to remember her less and less.
Of course, she was my mother, I knew that — she kept telling me so — "Soy tu mama!" But she also seemed a stranger, and all the more so whenever she started to speak Spanish, a language which, as time went by, sounded both familiar and oddly strange to me. I surely understood what she was saying (I always would); her words seemed to have something to do with our apartment on West 118th Street, con tu papa y tu hermano, and, yes, Cuba, that beautiful wonderland, so far away, of love and magic, which I had visited not so long before. Facing me, she'd raise the pitch of her voice, arch her eyebrows as if I would hear her better. She'd wipe a smear of lipstick onto a Kleenex from her black purse, muttering under her breath.
I remember nodding at her words; I remember understanding my mother when she said, "Mira aqui!" ("Look what I have!") as she reached into her bag for a little ten-cent toy; and "Sabes que eres mi hijo?" ("Do you know that you're my son?") and things like "Pero, por que estas tan callado?" ("Why are you so quiet?") and "Y que te pasa?" ("What's wrong with you?")
What happened to be wrong with me came down to the fact that I never answered my mother in the language she most wanted to hear, el espanol. I just couldn't remember the words, and this must have truly perplexed her, for I've been told that, before I went into the hospital, I spoke Spanish as cheerfully and capaciously as any four-year old Cuban boy. I certainly didn't know much English before then.
Maybe I'd picked up some from the neighbors in our building or from my brother, Jose, who, seven years older than I, attended the local Catholic grammar school and, like any kid, hung out on the streets; but, in our household, Spanish, as far as I can remember, was the rule.
Excerpted from Thoughts Without Cigarettes: A Memoir by Oscar Hijuelos. Copyright 2011 by Oscar Hijuelos. Reprinted by permission of Gotham Books.
Pulitzer Winner Who Wrote Of Cuban Experience Dies
by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
October 13, 201311:11 PM
Oscar Hijuelos, a Cuban-American novelist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1989 novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, and whose work often captured the loss and triumphs of the Cuban immigrant experience, died of a heart attack on Saturday. He was 62.
Stephen J. Boitano/AP
Hijuelos died of a heart attack in Manhattan on Saturday while playing tennis, according to his agent, Jennifer Lyons.
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love became a best seller and earned him international acclaim. He won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1990, making him the first Hispanic writer to receive that honor.
The novel tells the story of two Cuban brothers who journey from Havana to New York to start an orchestra. At one point in the story, the brothers appear on the television sitcom I Love Lucy, which starred Lucille Ball and her Cuban bandleader husband, Desi Arnaz. The book was eventually turned into a movie starring Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas.
In his 2011 memoir, Thoughts Without Cigarettes, Hijuelos writes of how he struggled against being labeled an "ethnic" writer and notes that even today there are few other Latinos whose work, despite the considerable number of talented authors, has been awarded the same recognition.
After a trip with his mother to Cuba as a young child, he became ill with a kidney disease and was hospitalized for a year, during which he loses his Spanish-speaking ability, and never truly recovers it.
"For the longest time, all I would know was that I had gotten sick in Cuba, from Cuban microbios, that the illness had blossomed in the land of my forebears, the country where I had once been loved and whose language fell as music on my ears," Hijuelos writes. "Of course, diseases happen anywhere, and children get sick under any circumstances, but what I would hear for years afterward from my mother was that something Cuban had nearly killed me and, in the process of my healing, would turn my own 'Cubaness' into air."
It was an experience of displacement and a never-ending inability to reach an identity he inherits that many Cubans of his generation can understand. It also defined much of his development as a writer, as he initially hesitated to embrace his story and that of his family as a source of inspiration for his fictional characters — too ashamed to put them on paper, believing the world was indifferent to his tale.
Hijuelos was born and raised in New York City and enrolled in local community colleges where an array of early writing teachers — Susan Sontag, Donald Barthelme, and Frederic Tuten — encouraged him to continue to pursue his craft. He was also exposed to Cuban and Latin American writers including Jose Lezama Lima, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes, whose work inspired him.
His other novels include Our House in the Last World, Empress of the Splendid Season, Dark Dude, The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien and A Simple Habana Melody. He was also received the Rome Prize and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
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