The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love - Latin Music CD for Dance Parties & Romantic Evenings - Perfect for Salsa Nights, Date Nights & Cultural Music Lovers

Oscar Hijuelos' Pulitzer Prize winning book The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is one of those that you'll either find to be colorful and lyrical, or confusing and monotonous. For this reader, this book falls into the first category, a rediscovered treasure read originally years ago and found here once again.Author Hijuelos tracks a family from one country to another through the world of and a culture from one world to the next in the form of several generations of Latin music. The contradanza, the habanera, the son, the rumba... all of these traveled from Cuba to America. They were transformed, trimmed and expanded for both American and Latino audiences, music for both the ears and the feet. It's the story of Cesar Castillo, an elderly musician who once in his life enjoyed some moments of musical celebrity, and chronicles his last hours as he sits in a rundown hotel room, drinking and listening to the old records made by his band.In 1949, Cesar and Nestor Castillo were just two of a multitude of Cuban musicians who came to New York City to seek their fame and fortune as musicians. The rumba was hot but the energetic mambo was hotter still. The story follows their struggles, their triumphs, their illusions, and their disillusions. It was a time when Xavier Cugat was fostering his belief that Americans wanted Latin dance music that appealed as much to the eyes as to the ears. And there was Desi Arnaz, the successful musician and television star, who to many young émigré musicians represented the American Dream.Cesar and Nestor established their own orchestra, the Mambo Kings, and put out their own records, each featuring a Miss Mambo pinup girl on the cover. They record their songs and play to ecstatic audiences, touring the East Coast in flamingo pink and black suits in their flamingo pink bus. And in 1955 their time of real glory arrives, when Desi Arnaz hears them performing in a New York dance club, and invites them to appear on his ''I Love Lucy'' television show, playing his cousins.Oscar Hijuelos scores the lives of the Castillo brothers, their families and their friends with numerous emotional tempos. Effusive and extroverted Cesar is filled with both gentleness and machismo. He's the gregarious driving force behind the Mambo Kings, a handsome, woman-hungry baritone who charms audiences and spreads his favors among the many women he beds. The introverted Nestor is the younger sibling, a talented trumpet player and songwriter, pining for the Maria who jilted him in Cuba, and has become the muse for all his musical compositions. He grows more inhibited and tries to bolster himself with readings from a self-help book.There's Nestor's wife Delores, a serious yet dreamily ambitious woman who hungers for a college education. Through the author's eyes and words the men and women who work as janitors, maids, and store clerks by day, then flock to the ballrooms at night, their etiquette a beautiful blend of both correctness and uninhibitedness.Cesar and Nestor love their women in completely different, but completely fascinating ways. Love is an idealistic dream for Nestor, somehow out of reach and a cause for nothing but pain. Cesar is the opposite, a truly amoral character who loves women with an unquenchable thirst, and we see that a big part of his life is his sexuality. Some of his escapades may be too graphic for some, yet we're left with the feeling that this is really a tale of music from the heart.There are times that Mr. Hijuelos's storyline occasionally falters. We frequently sojourn between Oriente in Cuba to Havana to New York and back. It appears to be that he's striving a bit too hard to get the details just right; at some points he seems to be distant, even self-conscious, yet in some fashion, his words do pull it all together.This was Oscar Hijuelos' second book, and it was published in 1989. It became an international bestseller, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1990. This was doubly important for the author, as it was the first novel by a United States-born Hispanic to do so. It was also the basis 1992 motion picture, The Mambo Kings, as well as a subsequent musical in 2005. The author's 2010 book Beautiful Maria of My Soul is a sequel, but told through the eyes of the same Maria who stole Nestor's heart and broke it.Author Hijuelos' tale is as unabashedly sensual as the music, culture and era that it celebrates. This is richly sorrowful music of the heart, and often something of this must be told as graphically as the author has done. It's an honest book, drenched in passion, a truly moving and reflective portrait of a man, his family, a society and a special period in America, and of immigrants pursuing the American Dream. This is a rich and absorbing novel about passion and loss, memories and desire, one that you won't easily forget.8/23/2012