Rating: 
Summary: Worth a try!
Review: Although this book is anything but action-heavy and drags a bit at some points, it is Hijuelos' prose that kept me reading. Therefore, if you are someone who needs action and plot to hold your interest in a story then this book is probably not the best for you. As for myself, I enjoyed it because beautifully poetic prose like Hijuelos' leaps off the page at me and keeps me amazed.
Rating:
Summary: Worth a try!
Review: Although this book is anything but action-heavy and drags a bit at some points, it is Hijuelos' prose that kept me reading. Therefore, if you are someone who needs action and plot to hold your interest in a story then this book is probably not the best for you. As for myself, I enjoyed it because beautifully poetic prose like Hijuelos' leaps off the page at me and keeps me amazed.
Rating:
Summary: Lyrical writing; almost like music
Review: At the opening of the book, Israel Levis, a Cuban pianist and composer, returns home to Cuba. He had been picked up by Nazis in France, where he was living at the time, and tranported to a concentration camp, his identity being taken as a Jew because of his name. Upon arriving back in Cuba, Israel Levis reminisces about those things about himself that had a impact upon his life. His greatest achievement had been writing an internationally-known song, Rosas Puras, for his friend Rita Valladares, a beautiful and coquettish singer for whom he always had a secret love interest. Being kind of timid in matters of love and very devoted to his devoutly Catholic mother, Levis fills his life with music and parties, never giving voice to his love of Rita. A rotund man with sexual desire but no woman of his own, Levis finds solace in brothels first in Cuba and later in France.The author has a beautiful way of looking into one man's life. In telling Levis' sad story, Hijuelos creates a character so real, one does not know if this person really existed or not. Levis' frailties and thoughts are so equisitely presented, you almost wish you could jump into the book and have a part in this man's life. Perhaps you could just talk to him and bring him the joy and fulfillment that he seems to be missing time after time. His solace is music. How comforting to know that a person who uses his talent to the best of his ability has the love of music to fall back on when other things in his life fail. The background of the story, a lively Habana in the early part of the twentieth century, is one that I was not familiar with so enjoyed learning about a different feel of life in Cuba from what I know about life in that country now.
Rating:
Summary: Lyrical writing; almost like music
Review: At the opening of the book, Israel Levis, a Cuban pianist and composer, returns home to Cuba. He had been picked up by Nazis in France, where he was living at the time, and tranported to a concentration camp, his identity being taken as a Jew because of his name. Upon arriving back in Cuba, Israel Levis reminisces about those things about himself that had a impact upon his life. His greatest achievement had been writing an internationally-known song, Rosas Puras, for his friend Rita Valladares, a beautiful and coquettish singer for whom he always had a secret love interest. Being kind of timid in matters of love and very devoted to his devoutly Catholic mother, Levis fills his life with music and parties, never giving voice to his love of Rita. A rotund man with sexual desire but no woman of his own, Levis finds solace in brothels first in Cuba and later in France. The author has a beautiful way of looking into one man's life. In telling Levis' sad story, Hijuelos creates a character so real, one does not know if this person really existed or not. Levis' frailties and thoughts are so equisitely presented, you almost wish you could jump into the book and have a part in this man's life. Perhaps you could just talk to him and bring him the joy and fulfillment that he seems to be missing time after time. His solace is music. How comforting to know that a person who uses his talent to the best of his ability has the love of music to fall back on when other things in his life fail. The background of the story, a lively Habana in the early part of the twentieth century, is one that I was not familiar with so enjoyed learning about a different feel of life in Cuba from what I know about life in that country now.
Rating: 
Summary: A beautiful melodious story!
Review: From the moment I opened up this novel I could just experience the warm tropic breezes of a free pre-revolutionary Cuba. The main character, Israel Levis as well as Rita Valladares, are very real Cuban characters that only an author with a rich Cuban background could achieve on paper. Oscar Hijuelos truly has "composed" a "beautiful Cuban symphony" of his own as he muses through the different stages of the life of Israel Levis and those people that were important to him. As he incorporates true great cuban composers (Moises Simons, Ernesto Lecuona, etc) into the very descriptive vignettes in the story lines you can almost sway to the Bolero and Rumba beat and hear the melodious voices of famous cuban singers as MarÃa Teresa Vera, Rita Montaner, Blanquita Amaro y Amelita Vargas; Also Israel is a prototype of Ernesto Lecuona with all his famous musical compositions in boleros, zarzuelas and danzas as he travels with his own band and is acclaimed throughout Europe and the Americas! The story has its poignant moments as well, specially the pre WWII Parisian epoch, the take over of France by the Nazi's and the horrible concentration camps! His return to Havana 1947 and his encounter with a normal life he had left so many years before... Yet, at the end, Hijuelos truly weaves in a powerful and beautiful portrayal of the main character's last days. I was deeply moved to tears while reading those last ten pages of the novel - Oscar Hijuelos, thank you for such a magnificent novel!
Rating:
Summary: A Bittersweet, Poignant Character Study
Review: I loved THE MAMBO KINGS PLAY SONGS OF LOVE (a Pulitzer Prize winner), so when I saw A SIMPLE HABANA MELODY on a bargain sale table, I bought it immediately and I'm so glad I did. Oscar Hijuelos is better known for writing huge, exuberant, rambunctious books and they're wonderful, but A SIMPLE HABANA MELODY is different. It's melancholy and soulful and poignant and bittersweet. It really is a marvelous character study of Israel Levis and Israel Levis is a marvelous character. Israel Levis, the protagonist of A SIMPLE HABANA MELODY is a man who contradicts every (mis)conception about the stereotypical "Latin lover"...except one. Levis was born in Havana in 1890, the son of a doctor with a definite Sephardic ancestor (Levis, however, is a devout Catholic). While still a pre-school child, it becomes obvious that Levis is a musical genius and before he's forty he writes more music than most composers do in a very long lifetime and he writes it with the ease with which other people write a grocery list. Although Levis makes regular visits to Havana's brothels (A SIMPLE HABANA MELODY doesn't, however, contain the coarse sex scenes found in THE MAMBO KINGS PLAY SONGS OF LOVE), his "true love," a cinnamon-skinned, blue-eyed singer named Rita Valladores always seems a little out of reach to Levis, which makes this book all the more poignant and melancholy since Rita cares for Levis as well, or at least she would if he would give he the smallest indication of his affection. It is Rita (and Levis's love for her) that inspires him, in 1928, to write "Rosas Puras," a rumba that becomes more popular than the Cuban national anthem. And, it's not only a hit in Cuba, it's a hit everywhere else as well. Because of the popularity of "Rosas Puras" so many "real" people have walk-on parts in A SIMPLE HABANA MELODY: Al Jolson, George Gershwin, Fred Astaire, Louis Armstrong, Xavier Cugat, Desi Arnaz and several others), making Levis seem all the more "real," himself. "Rosas Puras" becomes so popular that Levis can't go anywhere in the world without hearing the song being played. He hears it in Havana, even many years after he wrote it. He hears it in Paris and, strangely enough, he even hears it in Buchenwald. Political unrest forces Levis from Havana to Paris in the 1930s and, because of his Sephardic name, he spends fourteen months in Buchenwald. I know some people did not like this aspect of Levis's characterization and thought it overshadowed his other sadnesses. I didn't. While not downplaying the Holocaust, Hijuelos lets us know this isn't a book about a Holocaust survivor, but a man who is simply unfulfilled by life...or unable to take action that would bring him fulfillment and happiness. I don't think being a Holocaust survivor was necessary to Levis's characterization, though. He's a rich enough character without it. Hijuelos definitely has a talent for characterization and Levis is both complex and fascinating. He's narcisscistic, larger than life, brilliantly gifted, deeply flawed. It's so easy to care about him and to fall in love with his nostalgia for "when the days were good." Havana in the 1920s and Paris in the 1930s really come alive in this book. I felt like I was really there and Hijuelos's prose is sparkling and exuberant when it needs to be and melancholy and poignant when that is required. I think the book ends on a "pitch perfect" note and I kept thinking about it long after I'd finished it. In A SIMPLE HABANA MELODY, Oscar Hijuelos has done what so many "debut" authors forget to do: he has created a character that we can really care about. He has made us care. And Levis undergoes many changes during the course of the novel. He is not the same man at the book's end that he was at its beginning. I loved A SIMPLE HABANA MELODY, primarily because of the fascinating character of Israel Levis. There are a lot of "Cuban" books out there now and most of them are trite and not worth the time it takes to read them. Oscar Hijuelos, however, gives us the genuine article and he gives it to us in a very entertaining fashion. Recommended for anyone who loves Latin American literature and strong character studies.
Rating:
Summary: Biography of a timid man.
Review: Israel Levis, a man of 58, returns to Habana in 1947, after ten years in Europe, still weak from his internment at Buchenwald. A devout Catholic who was branded a Jew on the basis of his Catalan name, Levis escaped the worst of that work camp's horrors because the commandant knew he was a noted composer and pianist and assigned him to perform at Nazi gatherings. Now old before his time and living with a servant and maid in the old family home in Habana, Levis tries to distill some sort of meaning about art, love, and God from his experiences in Europe and from his long career as a musician/composer.
This is a difficult task. He has spent a lifetime avoiding personal decisions, letting life happen to him, and remaining passive when faced with those moments which make life meaningful for most of us. As he and the reader review those pivotal moments in which he failed to act, we have an opportunity to see how these events, when taken cumulatively, have led to his ultimate loneliness and despair.
Unlike most novels, in which the reader is drawn into the action and participates in events with the main character, this novel, though assured and beautifully written, keeps the reader at a distance, feeling more like a biography written by a detached observer than a novel. This is completely consistent with Levis's uninvolved personality, but it leads to a novel which, though full of melancholy and moving in its depiction of a man who just can't make important commitments, lacks the action, interactive conflict, confrontation, and narrative movement which make novels memorable for many of us. Despite Levis's connections with Al Jolson, George Gershwin, Fred Astaire, Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso, and a host of other luminaries of the mid 20th century, which add color and give context to Levis's ex-patriot life in Paris, this novel remained for me more like a black and white film than the lively and colorful evocation of Cuban music and its importance to music history that I had expected from its reviews. Mary Whipple
Rating:
Summary: Biography of a timid man.
Review: Israel Levis, a man of 58, returns to Habana in 1947, after ten years in Europe, still weak from his internment at Buchenwald. A devout Catholic who was branded a Jew on the basis of his Catalan name, Levis escaped the worst of that work camp's horrors because the commandant knew he was a noted composer and pianist and assigned him to perform at Nazi gatherings. Now old before his time and living with a servant and maid in the old family home in Habana, Levis tries to distill some sort of meaning about art, love, and God from his experiences in Europe and from his long career as a musician/composer. This is a difficult task. He has spent a lifetime avoiding personal decisions, letting life happen to him, and remaining passive when faced with those moments which make life meaningful for most of us. As he and the reader review those pivotal moments in which he failed to act, we have an opportunity to see how these events, when taken cumulatively, have led to his ultimate loneliness and despair. Unlike most novels, in which the reader is drawn into the action and participates in events with the main character, this novel, though assured and beautifully written, keeps the reader at a distance, feeling more like a biography written by a detached observer than a novel. This is completely consistent with Levis's uninvolved personality, but it leads to a novel which, though full of melancholy and moving in its depiction of a man who just can't make important commitments, lacks the action, interactive conflict, confrontation, and narrative movement which make novels memorable for many of us. Despite Levis's connections with Al Jolson, George Gershwin, Fred Astaire, Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso, and a host of other luminaries of the mid 20th century, which add color and give context to Levis's ex-patriot life in Paris, this novel remained for me more like a black and white film than the lively and colorful evocation of Cuban music and its importance to music history that I had expected from its reviews.
Rating: 
Summary: Solid craftmanship
Review: The best I can say about this book is that it is wonderfully written. Hijuelos definitely is one of the best contemporary writers in America. Yet in this book he lacks his usual pace. Having read every one of his books, I must say this one was a bit disappointing. It has great lengths which could have been avoided. The fictous life story of Israel Levis also paints a picture of Cuba before Castro, which very few of us know about. Nevertheless it lacks a lot of substance. On some occasions - unfortunately - I had to drag myself through this book. I would not read it again, which I did several times with "Mambo Kings".
Rating:
Summary: A deep and enlightening story
Review: The composer Israel Levis became so real for me while reading this novel that I, with a degree in musicology, had to go online and see if he was indeed a "real" person! While there were parts of Levis' personality I found somewhat... revolting, the author's command of the world of Cuban music, Cuban history, European cultural life and European history are stunning.
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