Chalk this one up to randomness — I finally finished The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, and the library is closed for one more day, so I take a look at my list of Pulitzers and started digging into anything that caught my eye on Kindle. There are a few, and I’ve marked them, but it was only when I started getting tired that I decided, “Well, this one’s got to be the one.”
And the “one” turned out to be 1969’s winner, House Made of Dawn, by M. Scott Momaday. I have absolutely no idea what it’s about, but I’ll find out soon enough. Still, I’m excited about the book already. This is exactly the kind of adventure I want in my reading. And of course, being a Pulitzer, it’s 99 percent likely to be a good book (we all can’t forget The Executioner’s Song).
Now, about those Mambo Kings…
I liked the book well enough, but it still came in at 15 on my current list (which is now up to 21 books). Right after Lonesome Dove (and I found it to be similar in some respects, particularly in the way of pacing), and right before The Old Man and the Sea, which was decent, but short and unremarkable.
The story is interesting in some respects, but a bit rambling. There were two cases in particular where Hijuelos really went off in a bizarre way, but those short passages (of only a few pages each) were it. The story covered the lives of two Cuban brothers by jumping around a bit too much for comfort, though it did capture a bit of the flavor of Cuban culture and music.
But there was one glaring problem. Oscar Hijuelos appears to have been overly fond of graphic acts of sex. I do not think I’m over-exaggerating when I say there were somewhere around 100 sexual acts performed in this 407-page book. I don’t mean to sound prudish here — I understand that certain events and actions can be expected in the course of a story that tells a man’s life, but this was ridiculous. For one example — from one of the rambling passages I mentioned in the previous paragraph — the character reminisced through a list of names of the young women he’d known when he was young in Cuba; and each reminiscence was a description of how he first had sex with them. I can’t help but wonder what the book would have been like without the sex. Hijuelos’s writing style is really not bad. I enjoyed it in some stretches. But I couldn’t help but think the man was a bit twisted and obsessed.
In the end, the story didn’t seem to have much of a point but to capitalize on the liveliness of Cuban culture to drag you through a man’s life (although I loved the experience of a culture so colorful). He played music, and he had sex. Lots of sex. His life seemed defined by the sex he had. And so I’d say it was an alright book, but overall disappointing in light of what I expected from the title.