Some of My Favorite Books: Our House in the Last World

Recently in the excitement over Cane, someone mentioned in a discussion that the writer had written Mambo Kings. Of course, someone else immediately corrected that she might have written the screenplay, but the novel was written by Oscar Hijuelos. And so it was. Of more importance to me, much as I enjoyed both the movie and the book, is Hijuelos' first novel, Our House in the Last World, so much so that I reread it this week.

There are so many different worlds in this book that it is difficult to apply the title to any one locale at any one time. There is the world of Holguin, Cuba in the early half of the century, the world of immigrants on the upper side of Broadway in New York, a glimpse of 1960's Miami, the oblique reference to Castro's Cuba, even a dream world in Isabella and Ferdinand's Court. In fact, that is the hallmark of this moving novel, in which meaning is layered upon meaning.

Ostensibly, the novel traces the family history and love story of Mercedes and Alejo Santinio as they meet at the movies, fall in love, and marry. Paradoxically, despite the spare prose, there is richness here. Hijuelos evokes the Cuba of that generation using dreams to convey an idealized, yet realistic portrait. Later, as the young couple emigrates to NYC long before the revolution, he depicts faithfully the experience of those early Cubans, as well as other immigrants, who came to the bleak environs of New York's tenements, to jobs in factories and restaurants, and to a world where they didn't even speak the language. It is easy for those of us who lived through those times to see ourselves in that world.

As their marriage turns sour, Alejo turns into an abusive drunk who never misses a day of work in the hotel kitchen and the high-strung Mercedes becomes unhinged, the novel quickly becomes a story of familial dysfunction, much of it seen through the eyes of their two sons. But this is no facile depiction. Much as we resent Alejo's bullying, we pity him when his desperate love for his two sons is rejected as a result of his own actions. We pity him as life and his dreams and all those Cubans he helps pass him by. Our sympathies for Mercedes are qualified when we see the havoc she wreaks. Even as we feel for the sons, brought up in abuse and unpredictability, we share in their guilt. Again, anyone who has seen substance abuse close up will easily recognize the Santinios.

Then there is the revolution, only this time obliquely from the perspective of those who were already here. We see the excitement of many of the early immigrants, their support for Fidel, the famous visit, and later their disillusionment as word and exiles began to filter in from Cuba when the revolution is betrayed. A word- this is not a political story. Don't expect any condemnation or praise.

However, Our House in the Last World is rife with longing. As a novel, it is summarily painful, yet cathartic to read. You really do care, at least if you're Cuban, I think.