Oscar Hijuelos's sixth novel, A Simple Habana Melody, is as much a love song to prewar Cuba as the "simple melody" at the center of the book. That tune, named "Roses Puras," was written by Hijuelos's protagonist, the aging composer Israel Levis, in the 1920s for his protégé and secret love, the singer Rita Valladares. The novel is set just after World War II, when Levis has returned to his childhood home in Havana after many years in Europe, at first in Paris, then in Buchenwald, where he was interned by Nazis who ignored the crucifix around his neck and focused only on his Sephardic name. The bittersweet feelings Levis bears toward "Rosas Puras" ("Beautiful Roses"), his best-known song, were further complicated when a German officer, who had gathered some musically gifted inmates for a concert, asked him to play this catchy old tune, unaware that Levis had written it. But this is not primarily a war novel; it is a novel of memory, a series of visits to the beautiful, vanished world of Levis's childhood and youth seen through the lens of his later suffering. Written with the same richness of detail, sensuality, and musicality of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990, A Simple Habana Melody contains even greater emotional depth and narrative complexity. --Regina Marler


From Publishers Weekly
After Auschwitz, there can be no poetry, Adorno famously, and wrongly, intoned. Hijuelos is after a milder, and seemingly more eccentric, moral conundrum: can there be, after Buchenwald, any more rumbas? The question is not as silly as it sounds at first - as Hijuelos points out, the rumba was the invention of a "lonely, begrieved slave" who "took up guitars and drums, and eventually created the rumba - a dance of a few closely held (chain-bound) steps..." The maker of rumbas at the center of this novel is Cuban musician Israel Levis, sent to Buchenwald in 1943. Hijuelos begins his story with Levis, now a thin, elderly-looking man, coming back to Habana in 1947, then leads up to the events that foreground that return. Brought up as a child prodigy in a good, upper-class family, Levis progresses from recitals of the classics to compositions soaked in the music of the street. In particular, Levis loves the zarzuela, a type of Cuban operetta in which rumbas prominently feature. "Rosas Puras," the most famous rumba of the '20s and '30s, was Levis's composition. He wrote it with his favorite lyricist, Manny Cortez, in the Campana Bar, for his favorite singer and the love of his life, Rita Valladores. Unfortunately for Levis, Cuba is ruled at this time by Geraldo Machado, a dictator, and Levis is eventually forced to leave his city because of Machado's harassment. He settles in Paris; takes a Jewish dance instructor, Sarah Rubinstein, as his lover; and collaborates on an opera with her brother, George, until the world falls down in 1940. While there is a faintly contrived air about Levis's experience of the Holocaust, Hijuelos triumphs in capturing the sights and sounds of Habana at the edge of modernity.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
With an impressive string of novels to his credit, including the Pulitzer Prize- winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Hijuelos here re-creates the world of a gifted musician in the heyday of Cuban music. After he composes a catchy, world-famous rumba, Israel Levis abandons the brutal Machado dictatorship and moves to Paris in 1933. But when France falls to the Nazis, his name, inherited incidentally from a Sephardic ancestor, lands him in Buchenwald, where for 14 months the maestro hardly comprehends what is happening. But Levis survives to resume his life in postwar (and pre-Castro) Havana. Hijuelos magically conveys the teeming excitement of musical Cuba, incorporates real characters such as Buster Keaton, George Gershwin, and Al Jolson, and deftly portrays Levis's sexual ambiguities, which include his platonic love for a talented Cuban mulata, an earthier liaison with a beautiful Jewish Resistance fighter, and an oblique but lifelong fascination with the charms of men better-looking than he is. Powerfully evocative of the music and moods of the period, this novel is highly recommended as both psychological and "show biz" fiction.Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, CumberlandCopyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Hijuelos's novel presents a mildly fascinating look at a self-absorbed Cuban composer of worldwide fame, Israel Levis. It opens with Levis's return to Cuba after being gone for fifteen years, two of which were spent in Buchenwald. (Though a Catholic living in Paris at the time of his arrest, Levis's name convinced the Nazis that he was Jewish.) Flashbacks then tell Levis's life story from his birth in 1890 through the great acclaim for his musicianship. Actor Jimmy Smits is a good, not great, reader of this good, not great, book. He does merit high marks for the frequent Spanish phrases, but listeners will wish for more character differentiation and more drama. T.H. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
(*Starred Review*) Perhaps no other contemporary novelist has managed to sustain a melancholy mood more convincingly than Hijuelos does in this haunting story of a Cuban composer whose life is an agonizing mix of joy and sadness, creativity and repression. The story begins in 1947, when the 58-year-old Israel Levis returns to his native Habana after spending most of the 1930s in Paris and then enduring two years in Buchenwald (Levis, a Catholic, was assumed by the Nazis to be a Jew because of his name). Hijuelos jumps gracefully between past and present, lingering on Levis' early years in Cuba, when he emerged as a musician and composer, enjoying "small ecstasies of creativity and public acclaim" and reveling in Habana's cafe society. Torn between Old World propriety and sensual craving, Levis frequents bordellos but is too timid either to pursue young singer Rita Valledares, whom he loves passionately, or to act on his attraction to men. The pull and push between the joy and freedom he feels in his creative life and the sadness and lack of fulfillment that torment his personal life reverberate in his music, especially in the song Rosas Puras ("Pure Roses"), which he writes for Rita and whose success paves the way for his later triumphs in Paris. No one writes about cities more vividly than Hijuelos. Whether describing Levis enjoying drinks and cigars with his fellow musicians in the Campana Bar in Habana or strolling with Rita along the Rue de Seine in Paris, he allows us to experience setting not as background but as an extension of a character's soul, a force inextricably entangled with every kind of sensual pleasure, especially music. As in The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), Hijuelos uses music to accentuate his characters' moments of triumph, to mourn their losses, and to evoke their longing for a time "when the world was good." Like the most tender of ballads, this heartbreaking novel laments lost love while it helps us remember how love felt when we were young. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved