Thoughts Without Cigarettes: Review and Free Giveaway

Thoughts Without Cigarettes: A Memoir by Oscar Hijuelos

Release date: 2011 / 367 pages

Synopsis (from the back cover): Born in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights to Cuban immigrants in 1951, Hijuelos introduces readers to the colorful circumstances of his upbringing. The son of a Cuban hotel worker and exuberant poetry- writing mother, his story, played out against the backdrop of an often prejudiced working-class neighborhood, takes on an even richer dimension when his relationship to his family and culture changes forever. During a sojourn in pre-Castro Cuba with his mother, he catches a disease that sends him into a Dickensian home for terminally ill children. The yearlong stay estranges him from the very language and people he had so loved.…

First Sentence: Seems just like yesterday (an illusion) that I was sitting out front on my stoop on 118th street, on an Autumn day, in 1963 or so, feeling rather indignantly disposed and pissed off because my best friend from across the way, with a somewhat smug look in his eyes, kept blowing smoke into my face.

Review: I accepted this memoir for review because I have been meaning to read The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love for years, and I wanted the experience of reading a memoir of a writer before having read anything s/he had written to see how my knowledge of his or her life would color the experience. So, I can begin this review by honestly stating a reader would not need to have any experience with Hijuelos’s writing to enjoy his memoir.

Hijuelos is a glorious, sumputous, overwhelming story-teller. He is generous with his life — beginning with his earliest memories and ending with the Pulitzer announcement. At times I wondered if I would begin to feel bogged down by the prodigious details Hijuelos includes with each memory and each stage of life, but although this was not a fast read, I truly loved getting lost in his 1950′s New York childhood, his time in Rome on a writing fellowship, and his experience with fame.

The dominant chords of this memoir — and of his life — involve identity, his relationship with his father and mother, his association with his Cuban ancestry. Gravely ill as a child, he spent much of his childhood under the close watch of his mother, but was unable to speak Spanish after a stint in a children’s hospital:

“But since I spent most of my days as an infant with my mother, going just about everywhere with her — to the nearby Columbia University campus, by whose fountains we would sit, or down the hill to Moarningide Drive and the circle that looked easward over Harlem, where the other young mothers from that block sometimes gathered with their strollers and baby carriages — that language, Spanish, must have permeated me like honey, or wrapped around my soul like a blanket or, if you like, a mantilla, or, as my mother, of a poetic bent of mind, might say, like the sunlight of a Cuban spring.”

Hijuelos — the first Latino writer to win the Pulitzer — looks more Irish than Cuban, which has greatly influenced his experience as a Latin American. People often assume he is Caucasian, so he is privy to people’s true thoughts about race or is even thought to be an imposter. However, his credibility as a storyteller is never in doubt. I particularly enjoyed his “asides” often placed in parenthesis that lent an intimacy and warmth to the relationship between writer and reader:

“As for the actual quality of the writing in that piece, it was, I think, rather dense and, in its way, colorful. (I always loved details, though; with the way I thought and still think, order was never one of my fortes).”

His experiences are wrapped in lovely prose that transports the reader to the depths of New York City or the heights of a childhood visit to Cuba:

“In that campo persisted a strong, almost overwhelming scent, not of animal dung or of burning tobacco but of an aroma I still recall from that visit — the air always smelling like the raw inner marrow of a freshly cut or snapped-open sapling branch, redolent of the juices of its white and yellow fringed fibers, of teh earth and water, and of greenness itself.

So, I definitely recommend this memoir and believe many others would, too..

Interested in winning a free copy? Drop me a comment below and I will choose a lucky winner by the weekend!

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