Review of Beautiful Maria of My Soul

BEAUTIFUL MARIA OF MY SOUL by Oscar Hijuelos

“Twenty years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos revisits the passion between a Cuban musician and a young woman of legondary beauty in pre-Castro Havana. This time, in Beautiful Maria of My Soul, Hijuelos gives us Maria's side of the torrid love affair. The new novel's title is taken from the song Nestor Castillo spends years revising after a powerful rival for Maria causes him to flee Cuba for New York City, where the tune, a bolero, eventually brings him and his brother Cesar brief success.
 
Beginning when she leaves her rural home for Havana, we follow Maria through her success as a dancer and then the days of her  and Nestor's romance, told with as much sizzle as Hijuelos used in Mambo Kings. We then learn of her increasing regret for not going with Nestor to the United States.
 
Playing with his readers, Hijuelos weaves the two novels together, even making himself a minor player in Beautiful Maria. He notes how the younger version of himself won acclaim for Nestor's story, then relates how Maria too gains brief fame when first the song and then the movie of Hijuelos' novel makes the love affair the stuff of legend. As with Mambo Kings, Hijuelos writes with an intensity and frankness that might make readers blush even as they sigh over the doomed romance. Taken together, the two novels themselves are likely to become legendary.”

-Reviewed by June Ulkoski