Of Mambo and Magical Realism

In 1990, at the age of 38, Oscar Hijuelos became the first Hispanic American to win the Pulitzer Prize for his second novel. The Mambo kings Play Songs of Love. Born in New York City to Cuban immigrant parents, Hijuelos attended City College where his memos included Donald Barthelme and Susan Sontag. Hijuelos held a low-level job with a mass transit advertising agency before quitting in 1980, when his first novel, Our House in the Last World, was published. He spoke recently with The Crimson about his new novel. The fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien.

Q: Fourteen Sisters is a departure from Mambo Kings, which was a very "macho" novel. There has been much talk of the femininity of this novel, and questions about your ability as a male writer to write about women. What do you say to this?

A: I've been asked this lately a lot. Women are just human beings. I did start from the premise that females have their own nature, their own ways of dealing with the world, and I try to relate to that. I think of my own mother, for example, I think of the women I've known. I think a bit of what might be called sympathetic imagination. I have respect for (women), in particular Latin women, who I think are very strong and in their own way they're duerias of the house. I think the book in a way came out of a meditation on what women have to deal with and some of their inner feelings.

Q: Relating that to literature, what do you think of the new crop of Latina writers like Sandra Cisneros and Cristina Garcia?

A: I wish them well I think that they're trying to find ways of expressing their own take on their experiences. I think Cristina Garcia's work is more ambitious, although I like Cisneros. I like the individuality of their work, and I wish them well. I'd like to see [Cisneros] write a book about going to England. I think literature should do two things at least culturally, and that is to preserve the culture, but also get some insight as to how the culture interacts with other generations, with another culture, and also about the inner life of the writers. My only fear is that writers delegate themselves to this corner bodega. To escape the provincialism of roots and be expansive in the manner of a wonderful writer like [Jose] Lezama Lima, or [Jorge Luis] Borges or, for that matter, someone like Rudyard Kipling. And if I can find a readership in that way, then I think it will take the shackles of being politically and sociologically correct off of writers that may want to do different things, but don't because they're afraid.

Q: Do you think that your having won the Pulitzer Prize has made Publishers more willing to publish Latino writers?.

A: I think that The Mambo Kings, before the Pulitzer, changed things. I think with the Pulitzer, it helped us along even more. It's hard to say. New York publishers are impressed by breakthroughs and I think it certainly did help them. I think that it maybe set up an idea in the minds of the literary establishment [about] Latino writers who, I think, for many years--with some exceptions like Richard Rodriguez and folks like him--did not get much play in the press. So it's opened eyes a little bit. I wouldn't take credit, because these writers work so hard, but I think I brought a little more attention to other writers.

Q: Returning to your book, what of its setting Cobbleton, Pennsylvania?

A: (laughs) It's my Macondo. It's now being written about as if it were a real place, and what cracks me up in the reviews is that no one says that Cobbleton is not a real town.

Q: Do you see the influence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Latin American magical realism as a burden for you and other Hispanic writers, something you can't get away from?

A: I don't see that, because I'm influenced by may writers other than him. I'm very Americanized, but I grew up with the culture of my parents, and to make the common seem magical is a way of getting through life with a lot of Latinos. So no, I don't see it as a burden. I think it's a tag that reviewers of limited reading may take. I think actually magical realism has been so overdone that it's really just a technique. What I wanted to do with Fourteen Sisters was to show the richness of the past, an American past but also interceding with this Cuban psyche and also with the Irish take on things, the melancholy which I guess is in all my books. There are parts of Fourteen Sisters that to me are truly magical that no one mentions, so different from Garcia Marquez that it's amazing to me. I could've written a follow-up to Mambo Kings could've done a follow-up to my first novel. I'm just trying to change things a little bit. Not to be [retentions, or anything, I just want to break the mold.