LIT REVIEW: Thoughts Without Cigarettes

Oscar Hijuelos discusses his struggle to bridge the gap between two worlds - Cuba and the United States - in his memoir, Thoughts Without Cigarettes, a chronological account of his life and transformation from introverted child to award-winning novelist.

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LIT REVIEW: Thoughts Without Cigarettes

POSTED: Thursday, July 21, 2011, 3:00 PM

In 1990, Oscar Hijuelos became the first Hispanic author to win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature. Yet he never set out to break down barriers through his work. In fact, Hijuelos felt estranged from his Cuban heritage for most of his life. The author discusses his struggle to bridge the gap between two worlds — Cuba and the United States — in his memoir, Thoughts Without Cigarettes (Gotham Books, June 2), a chronological account of his life and transformation from introverted child to award-winning novelist.

Growing up in a mixed-race New York City neighborhood, Hijuelos considered himself something of a misfit. His blond hair and fair complexion hardly fit with his Latin-sounding last name, his physical appearance rendering him self-conscious and awkward. Inside his family’s cramped apartment, he felt like just as much of an outsider. He describes his father, who passed away while Hijuelos was still in high school, as “muy muy Cubano.” His mother, speaking broken English only when absolutely necessary, longed for her childhood home of Holguín, Cuba all her life — never feeling truly at ease in the United States. His parents were stuck in Cuba while he could hardly imagine a world outside of New York City.

Hoping to change this, his mother took him and his older brother, José, to Cuba in 1955. The trip proved disastrous, however, when Hijuelos contracted nephritis, a life-threatening disease causing inflammation of the kidneys. He was taken back to New York, hospitalized and subject to a barrage of treatments that would last for years to come. Logical or not, Hijuelos would later interpret the incident as a sign that Cuba itself had not wanted him. Worse still — surrounded by doctors and nurses speaking English for months on end — he lost the ability to speak Spanish fluently. His mother never forgave him. The fact that her son refused to speak more than a few words strung together in her native language proved devastating for her, creating a rift between them that grew deeper over the years.

Hijuelos went on to earn a master’s in creative writing from City College, where he studied under such literary greats as Susan Sontag and Donald Barthelme. During this time, the author recalls, everything he wrote led back to either Cuba or his father — the two concepts eventually becoming intertwined. (On one occasion when he composed a short story devoid of any self-referential material, his agent flat-out told him it was the “worst and most pretentious thing” she had ever read.) Hijuelos published his first novel in 1983, a semi-autobiographical work titled Our House in the Last World. In 1985, Our House won the Rome Prize for Literature, and, just like that, he had made a name for himself.

Yet Hijuelos continued to be plagued by self-doubt. Still struggling to come to terms with his Cuban roots, the author set out to write what would become his most celebrated novel to date — The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. The book took shape as Hijueos pieced together stories from his childhood, his mother’s life, things family friends had told him and his own imagination. When it was finished, the narrative recounted the fictionalized life of Ceasar and Nestor Castillo, two musicians who immigrate to the United States to escape the political turmoil of Castro’s Cuba.

According to Hijuelos, his work on the book provoked a catharsis. In a way that he is not fully able to articulate, things seemed to fall into place while he was writing the novel and in the immediate aftermath of its publication. Perhaps because The Mambo Kings was so well received, he felt, for the first time, as though he had embraced his Cuban heritage and it had embraced him back. Just as significant, writing the novel allowed him to come to terms with the loss of his father.

Hijuelos recalls experiencing a “moment of true elation,” upon finding out that he had won the Pulitzer Prize. He writes: “I was in the front yard, relieved to be off the telephone, when I sensed in the shifting of light across the lawn my pop’s presence. His spirit, for better and for worse, in its kindness and gentleness, in its melancholy and alternately, exuberance, his love of life, fear of death, his passions and vices — down to the thousands of drinks he had consumed and cigarettes he smoked — were all there, transformed, in that book.”

It is hard to write a memoir without coming across as overly self-interested, but Hijuelos manages to do just that. Thoughts Without Cigarettes is honest and reflective, without seeming self-indulgent. The book invites readers to relive the highs and lows of the author’s career along with him, and provides insight the author’s innermost thoughts. Like anyone, Hijuelos has personal shortcomings and insecurities. Along with these aspects of his personality, however, he also demonstrates a tremendous capacity for resilience. That, at least, is worth emulating.

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