The collision of Cuban dreams with sometimes harsh American realities has been Oscar Hijuelos's great theme, most notably in Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Certainly it's at the heart of his fifth novel, Empress of the Splendid Season, which chronicles the trials, tribulations, and infrequent triumphs of a Cuban American clan over the course of a half century. The protagonist, Lydia Espana, has grown up in pre-Castro Cuba, the pampered daughter of a prosperous businessman. But when she has the audacity to violate her father's small-town code of conduct--by sleeping with an itinerant musician--she pays a terrible penalty: "Her family, turning unfairly against her with a nearly Biblical wrath, had banished her, unprepared to contend with an indifferent world."

Where is Lydia banished to? New York, of course. And in this most indifferent of cities, the former "queen of the Congo line" finds herself in a less exalted role: that of a cleaning woman. This demotion she accepts with a very credible mixture of resignation and rock-ribbed realism: "The hardest part of being a cleaning woman had to do with the way people looked at her; often as if she were 'nothing.' It hurt her most when men did not notice her. The nature of the work itself, the outfit, the end-of-the-day fatigue, the messiness of that labor were not glamorous, so what could she expect." Lydia is less sanguine about her family's difficulties, from her husband Raul's near-fatal heart attack to her son's brushes with the law. Empress of the Splendid Season is in fact an ensemble piece that passes the point of view from character to character, from generation to generation. But it's Lydia's sensibility--at once stoic and sensuous--that ultimately enlivens this latest take on the American (or perhaps Cuban American) Dream. --William Davies


Amazon.com Audiobook Review
Oscar Hijuelos, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, returns with this look at Harlem life in the mid-20th century. His story revolves around the trials and tribulations of Lydia España, a "wonder of affection, crankiness, strength, and gentility." Lydia's eternal belief that she is somehow special carries her through her life's changes, from pampered daughter of a wealthy Cuban family to struggling immigrant seamstress to widowed cleaning lady in Harlem. Rita Moreno reads this abridgment with considerable aplomb, her remarkable range of accents and emotions conveying all the novel's passion. (Running time: 6 hours, 4 cassettes) --C.B. Delaney


From Publishers Weekly
As in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Hijuelos imagines the life of a humble Cuban-American from the late '40s to the present. Latin sensuality turns to Yankee drudgery when Lydia Espana the spoiled daughter of a small-town Cuban alcalde, is banished from her home in 1947 for staying out till dawn after a dance. Romantic and uneducated, she moves to New York, where marries, and becomes a cleaning woman to keep her sick husband (a handsome waiter with refined manners) and two children from the brink of poverty. Lydia worries and dotes in the manner of a quintessential immigrant mother trying to maintain respectability and make ends meet. While the drab black-and-white of her daily life runs its course, a rich Technicolor fantasy of time-before plays through her head. In memory, Lydia is again the Empress of the Splendid Season, beautiful enough to catch the eye of a Hollywood star. Depicting Spanish Harlem with relentless realism, Hijuelos penetrates the lives behind the humble tenements and massive university buildings. With poignancy, he captures the lonely fear of Lydia's son as he makes his way up the ladder of American success, the apex of which is perhaps not as enviable as he and Lydia assume. Familiar Hijuelos elements?Latin music, introspective men, touches of magic realism in quietly powerful prose?render here a tender and undramatic portrait of a complex woman and her culture. Agent, Harriet Wasserman. Literary Guild selection. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Once called the "Professor of Cuba" by her father, Lydia is a long way from Havana in this novel, set in New York City from the 1950s to the mid-1980s. Disowned by her family, Lydia moves to New York and finds work as a seamstress. She marries and has two children, but her hopes of becoming a housewife come to an end when her husband suffers the first of many heart attacks. Lydia goes to work cleaning homes for wealthy New Yorkers, among them the Osprey family, who employ her for 20 years and who feature prominently not only in her life but in her family's as well. Lydia's story is one of assimilation and the future of different cultures as the next generation moves beyond its roots. The novel intermingles time periods, life histories, and social classes to create an intriguing look at family, wealth, and race in modern America. This multigenerational tale from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is well written and engrossing. Recommended for all public libraries.-?Robin Nesbitt, Hilltop Branch Lib., Columbus Metropolitan Lib., OHCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Verlyn Klinkenborg
...a tender novel.... This quality comes from the struggle between [Lydia's] instinct for self-invention and her inability to invent a suitable self...


The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Scott Bradfield
Nobody writes better about sensual life than Hijuelos, and Empress resounds with sights, tastes, textures and even the humming ambience of deep, well-appointed brownstone apartments.... [I]t's hard to think of a contemporary novelist who writes better about the people he knows than Hijuelos.


Boston Globe
"It is hard not to love Lydia Espana."


From AudioFile
In a luminous story, Oscar Hijuelos creates the life of Lydia Espana and her family in New York City in the mid-1960's. Rita Moreno perfectly portrays the beautiful Cuban who left her pre-Castro home after conflicts with her proud father, only to replay similar family struggles with her children in their new land of opportunity. Moreno infuses the pace--really, the BEAT--of Lydia's life with a sensual rhythm that highlights all the eloquent detail of the writing. A joy to listen to, Moreno inhabits each character with deft understanding. With Lydia herself, Moreno projects the complex dignity and strength of the story's soul. An entrancing listening choice. R.F.W. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
Pulitzer-winner Hijuelos (Mr. Ives Christmas, 1995, etc.) offers up a slow-moving but sometimes poignant slice-of-lifer about a Cuban-American family from the 1940s onward. The beautiful Lydia Espaa was born in pre-Castro Cuba, a privileged child with a businessman father who was a model of small-town eleganceand also of a fierce rectitude that made him turn violently against his daughter when she came into her own sexuality and slept one night with a musician. Off shes sent, alone, to New York City, where at first she supports herself as a seamstressuntil one night at a party in 1949 she meets her future husband, the stylish Raul, whos working there as a waiter. Though hes ten years her senior, the love is real, marriage follows, and so do two children, Alicia and Rico. Happiness enough blesses the familyuntil Raul collapses one day on a restaurant floor amid a clatter of dishes and trays, never again to be free of a debilitatingly weak heart that will keep him from returning to his jobwith the result that Lydia must be the breadwinner, doing so as that lowliest of workers, the cleaning lady. Years and then decades pass, a touch of Horatio Alger visits the book as an East Side advertising man Lydia cleans for proves wildly benevolent, and there are touches, too, of authorial tendentiousness when Hijuelos lets his theme of poverty versus wealth break through his novels real tone (earning in a week . . . what a chichi Soho artist will piss away on a lunch with friends at the Four Seasons . . . ). Most of the time, though, as usual, the author shows himself one of our most affectionate chroniclers of the citys less favored neighborhoods as the '60s come and go, then the '70s, and as the Espaa family passeswith dignity intactthrough time, life, work, sorrow, and love. Sturdy truths and honest humanity in another look at life la Hijuelos. (Literary Guild selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


People
"Simply Splendid...In Empress of the Splendid Season, Hijuelos lovingly suggests, true beauty lies in the small moments of a 'decent, genteel, low-key'life..."


National Public Radio
"Finely detailed, funny, sweet...a deliberately simple story graced with the power of the ordinary."


Miami Herald
"Exuberantly written...Hijuelos is an old-fashioned novelist...In Empress of the Splendid Season he has written a story with a lesson--he is telling us how to live."


USA Today
"It's refreshing, in these times of great American prosperity to read a novel about people who are just plain poor. Hijuelos is telling a story about small people, but in his skillful hands, they carry big ideas."


Elle
"A richly narrated novel...explores with passion. . .the strange workings of life, love [and] family."


San Diego Union-Tribune
"Oscar Hijuelos's powerful, subtle 'Empress' probes the mysteries of the soul. Hijuelos is a story teller...Along the way he beguiles you with anecdotes, vignettes, memories, dreams, reflections and revelations, in prose that is at times lyrical, at times colloquial, and always lucid."


Cleveland Plain Dealer
"This novel is beautifully evocative of a splendid empress, her culture, her time and her past."



"A richly narrated novel...explores with passion. . .the strange workings of life, love [and] family."



"A very human, eminently readable, and very funny book."



"This novel is beautifully evocative of a splendid empress, her culture, her time and her past."


Book Description
Oscar Hijuelos vividly brings to life the joys, desires, and disappointment of American life witnessed through the experience of a formerly prosperous Cuban émigré named Lydia Espana--now a cleaning woman in New York. In magnetic prose, he juxtaposes Lydia's tale with the stories of her clients, contrasting her experiences with the secret lives of those for whom she works. No one writes better of love or the pulse of a city, nor has any writer better captured the complexity inherent in the emigration experience; how assimilation is at once the achievement of dreams, yet also a loss of the past. Empress of the Splendid Season is Hijuelos at his masterful best, a novel filled with incantatory, rhythmic prose and rich in heartfelt vision.


About the Author
Oscar Hijuelos was born of Cuban parentage in New York City in 1951. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. His five previous novels have been translated into twenty-five languages.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
The Bolero King Plays Songs of Love

"In 1957 when her beloved husband, Raul, had fallen ill, Lydia Espana went to work, cleaning the apartments of New Yorkers much better off than herself." So begins Oscar Hijuelos's splendid new novel, Empress of the Splendid Season. For the next 40 years, Hijuelos's Cuban-born heroine will continue her humble career, inadvertently discovering the secrets of a long succession of eccentric Manhattanites while mopping and dusting their apartments.

The book's title is from a poem Raul composed one night dancing with Lydia before they were married. "Ever formal and attentive to Lydia, [Raul] remained the gentleman, at first preferring the slow dances, the boleros and ballads, over the mambos and cha-cha-chas, and, though he was not a romantic sort, the right piece of music, say 'Dulce Engano' ('Sweet Deception'), could bring out the poet hiding in his soul...." (Aha — Hijuelos is teaching a different style of Latin dance in this novel. Perhaps he even considered calling it The Bolero King Plays Songs of Love.) As Raul dances, reveling in the scent of Lydia's hair, he proclaims that she is the "Empress" presiding over the "splendid season" of love.

Oscar Hijuelos himself feels a little exiled from that song and season. "When you move away from the mythology of love, no matter how well you do in life, there's always a little bit of loneliness," he told me on the phone. He quoted his book's epigraph, from Milton, "Loveliness is the first thing which God's eye named not good...." Hijuelos then elaborated on his melancholy:"Imyself often feel extremely lonely. I mean, it's the nature of my work, solitude. But also I lament the passing of the idea of a community which I could easily fit in."

The community he means is a Cuban-American one. His parents left Cuba for Manhattan in the 1940s, and Hijuelos was born in Spanish Harlem in 1951. "There are strong Cuban-American communities in Miami and New Jersey," he said. "But here in New York, I live in a much more fragmented world in the sense that I belong to many communities and at the same time not solidly to any one."

I was quiet, then joked, "In other words, you're a typical New Yorker."

Hijuelos laughed. And why not? The city is the centerpiece of this book, as Lydia becomes witness to the crazy lives of those who live here. As a cleaning woman, her first clients include a spooky guy whose bathroom wall is covered with upside-down crucifixes and a prim gentleman who one day accidentally leaves pornographic photographs scattered in his bedroom, and — a classic Hijuelos touch — a frightened cat under the bed. Then Lydia begins her decades-long association with the enigmatic Mr. Osprey — described as a dead ringer for Eisenhower — who lives in a town house that takes up an entire city block. By the end of her career, after experiencing her neighborhood upheavals during the Columbia University strikes of the '60s, Lydia ends up cleaning for a woman who keeps semi-magical greyhounds in little cages in the living room.

Hijuelos admitted that a number of these stories were based on reality. For example, he knew someone who hung rows of crucifixes upside down along a bedroom wall. Lydia has a reminiscence set in Cuba that was based on what a Cuban lady once told Hijuelos: "She was with her very virginal great aunt in Havana. They saw Errol Flynn and the virginal aunt fainted."

Another Hollywood legend, James Mason, makes an appearance as Lydia glimpses the actor in front of a Manhattan hotel. "Yes, that really happened as well," Hijuelos explained. "I saw James Mason standing in front of the Plaza Hotel eating a sandwich, waiting for a car." Then he added, "Very gingerly eating a sandwich."

I tell the author that encountering a movie star in the flesh is the closest most of us ever come to experiencing magic realism. Hijuelos agreed. "Movie stars are the closest things we have to supernatural presence. The great thing about writing about Manhattan is that it's not implausible for Lydia to see James Mason. He appears as sort of a gleaming knight. There is a little undertone in the book that it's sort of a fairy tale. That's why I introduce these larger-than-life characters to emphasize the more romantic or fairy tale aspects of the story."

This talk of James Mason made me want to know about Hijuelos's Hollywood experiences with The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. "It's a crazy thing," he told me. "You sit around one day idly writing a scene wondering, Will anyone ever read this? And a year later see it up on a screen." Hijuelos even appeared as one of the extras. "There's a funeral scene, and I'm sort of in the crowd milling about." He laughed. "James Mason I'm not."

He then half modestly, half pleased with himself named a number of other movie stars he's met in the flesh. "But you know, the person who excited me most was García Márquez." Hijuelos met the abuelo of all magic realists at the White House during a recent reception for the Colombian president. "Márquez made my day because he told me he loved The Mambo Kings," Hijuelos said with pride, adding, "It's really a thrill to be in contact with a historical personage who is really personally meaningful as opposed to just being a movie star."

Later, while talking about writers we knew and what we were reading, Hijuelos said something that really illuminated his character for me. "I'm a real biography fan. I just finished reading Stefan Zweig's biography of Marie Antoinette (now out-of-print). I'm reading his biography of Balzac. I love reading biographies best because I love seeing the dynamics and curve of people's lives being laid out."

His words made me suddenly understand Empress of the Splendid Season better. As a novel that follows a woman's entire life, it's really a fictional biography. (Or perhaps the real biography of a woman who is only a fictional character.) Either way, this woman did not live just a single life. "Lydia is always thinking of her other past, that alternate one if she had stayed in Cuba," Hijuelos explained. "James Mason both symbolizes the husband she would have had if she'd stayed in Cuba as well as her ideal fantasy of life in America."

Hijuelos was living two lives as well: "I still dream about a boyhood trip to pre-Castro Cuba. If not for a quirk of fate, that is where I would have been born. I would have had my father's childhood experience of growing up on a Cuban farm." Hijuelos revealed that he was as obsessed with James Mason as he was with his doppelgänger's life in Cuba. "I've always kind of liked James Mason the actor," the author said. "Matter of fact, once upon a time I almost wrote a book called The Man Who Thought He was James Mason."That said, swear to God, Hijuelos has to answer the door to let in his...cleaning lady. I don't ask her name. Lydia Espana is surely just a fictional creation. But perhaps she is also as metaphysical as James Mason. Who knows? In Manhattan, anything can happen....
— David Bowman

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In his new novel, Hijuelos tells the story of Lydia Espana, a beautiful and formerly prosperous emigre from pre-Castro Cuba, who becomes a cleaning lady in New York. Once the spoiled, pampered daughter of a small-town mayor and adored by men — a 'queen of the Conga line' — she is forced because of a youthful sexual indiscretion to leave home and, in 1947, finds herself suddenly living the life of the working poor. In time she falls in love with Raul, a humble waiter. One night in a Manhattan ballroom, in the middle of a bolero, Raul proposes marriage, for Lydia is his "empress of the most beautiful and splendid season, which is love." A life of promise is disrupted when Raul falls ill and Lydia, finding employment as a domestic, becomes the head of the family. Striving to educate her two children, Rico and Alicia, in the style of the upper class, she must endure a lesson in humility, cleaning the homes of New Yorkers much better off than herself. Among her employers is Mr. Osprey, a reserved and kindly lawyer, who eventually takes an interest in her family's well-being and, during the turmoil of the 1960s, intervenes at a critical juncture in the life of her teenage son, Rico. Throughout this novel Lydia remains a sensual and powerful woman who meets the trials of a lonely life with humor and a gleam of triumph in her eye — a sense that she is someone special — an empress of fortitude, of dignity.

SYNOPSIS

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos portrays the joys and frustrations of Lydia Espa￯﾿ﾽa, a Cuban ￯﾿ﾽmigr￯﾿ﾽ who works as a cleaning woman in Manhattan, while exploring stories of the secret lives she uncovers in her clients' apartments.

FROM THE CRITICS

Susan Jackson

The dialogue in Empress is clever and the portraits charming...Hijuelos is at his best depicting everyday folks treading water between the old world and the new.
— Time Out New York

R. Z. Sheppard - Time Magazine

Hijuelos' episodic format doesn't quite gel. But that is more than offset by his emotional fine tuning and pitch-perfect prose.

Carroll Bogert - USA Today

This is a novel about frustrated hope: the hope of an immigrant who never manages to assimilate, and the hope of a young woman for whom life didn't turn out as planned. Hijuelos is telling a small story about small people, but in his skillful hands, they carry big ideas.

Time

A slow dance, an elegy to a cleaning woman,that continues the author's celebraton of his Cuban roots. A character endowed with romantic yearnings, Lydia moves with stoic grace through the decades...Emotional fine tuning and pitch-perfect prose.

Verlyn Klinkenborg - The New York Times Book Review

...[T]he splendid season is, of course, a time of love....the pivotal crises of Lydia's life...comes from the struggle between her instinct for self-invention and her inability to invent a suitable self....The New York that emerges...is as layered as Lydia's innter life....The city both echoes and shapes her moods. Read all 32 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING