Tag: Paris

Old Havana’s (Flawed) Maestro (A Simple Habana Melody by Oscar Hijuelos)

“I’m feeling inspired—quick, I need a drink.”

“In the spring of 1947, when Israel Levis, composer of that most famous of rumbas ‘Rosas Puras,’ returned to Habana, Cuba, from Europe… his old friends…were startled by his appearance.” So, Oscar Hijuelos’ novel A Simple Habana Melody begins: a time, a maestro-protagonist, a place, and a change.

We learn that Levis, a child protégé, grew up in a doting family with one living brother (three other childhood deaths, which explains the “doting” mother). Doña Concepción, urges her son to “pray and pray to God that He protect him. She rewards his obedience with a great abundance of food. From a chubby child, Israel grows into a big man with big appetites. Virile, Levis frequently visits Habana’s prostitutes (and later those of Paris); still, he’s attracted to “handsome young men”. He’s a man in love with Rita Valadares, but unable to declare his love for her (although he writes the famous “Rosas Puras” for the sensuous singer).

Hijuelos also describes how “The early 1930s were an especially brutal time for the arts in Cuba….” This is the time after the island gained independence from Spain, and the former general, now dictator, Machado was running Cuba, a time when Levis’ friends “vanished without a trace or had been sent to prison.” Yet Levis “lived with the illusion that the ever-growing list of crimes committed by the dictator and the intensifying oppression and mockery of the arts would pass, in time.” Somehow, Levis sees himself apart from the politics of the era, assured that God would protect him. But raids by the secret police, “porra,” intensify.

On an April evening, 1932, Levis and his friend and collaborator, Manny Cortez meet at the Campana Bar.

“Later, Levis slept restlessly, and had a disquieting dream about a raven crouching on a skull, its flapping wings and cries of caw, caw so loud and mocking that he abruptly awoke at three in the morning….”

Manny had been killed, “Traces of the lyricist’s bloodstains were to be found on the paving for weeks.” Frightened, Levis leaves Cuba to go on tour. We jump ahead to Paris. A love story is dropped into the novel and, because of his Jewish-sounding name—although a devout Roman Catholic—Levis is detained and sent to Buchenwald. ”For the next 14 months, the maestro did not believe the things he saw, nor the sounds he heard.” Levis avoids the fate of others by playing his music for German brass, but we glimpse little of that experience or his reaction, except afterward, back on the streets of Habana,  he was pained whenever he heard his music.

The trajectory of Levis’ life is fraught with his blindness, which I accepted until he reaches Paris and then Buchenwald during WWII. The Paris relationship felt out of character and the Buchenwald experience shallow. Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (a Pulitzer Prize winner) fails in A Simple Habana Melody to fully engage and sustain belief to the end. If  Hijuelos intended a somewhat degenerate maestro and his fall as metaphor for Cuba, he fails.

What drew me to A Simple Habana Melody—and what kept me reading—were Hijuelos’ descriptions of Habana before the malecón had been built, a time when “the sea crashed freely against the rocky shore.” He writes of the city’s history, how Habana derives its name from “an Indian chieftain, Habaquanex,” and of how the city of old “bustled with the energy of an old European capital.” In a later period, with Levis, we wander the streets of the city and we see the majestic buildings that graced the neighbourhoods and glimpse the very different life of Habana after independence from Spain and dictatorship of Machado.

Oscar Hijuelos gives readers a complex, conflicted and flawed character during a political era and context that should make for page-turning-late-into-the-night reading. But the story often falls flat. Nevertheless, if you are curious about Cuba’s marred history and want to glimpse Habana during an exciting artistic period, A Simple Habana Melody provides a portal into those times and place.

38 A Simple Habana Melody

Available through your local bookstore or online: A Simple Habana Melody

Magic of the 8e Paris (The Emperor of Paris by CS Richardson)

Reading The Emperor of Paris is a bit like picking up puzzle pieces one-by-one and slowly discovering the picture they create. In each short chapter, we peek into the lives of the people of the eighth arrondissement, Paris. It’s a particularly innocent era before World War I when the neighbourhood was a place disconnected from the larger city and world. And after the war we witness transformations – some difficult, others freeing.

A bakery – Boulangerie Notre-Dame – stands at the centre of the 8e neighbourhood. Here we meet many of the book’s characters and glimpse their personalities, challenges, and their moods. In living quarters above the bakery we share an intimacy between Monsieur (which everyone calls the baker) and little Octavio:

Sitting in the attic window with his son nestled in his lap, Monsieur Notre-Dame would slowly turn the pages of the Arabian Nights. When he reached an illustration, Octavio would laugh and point.

A beginning then, Monsieur would say.

He told the boy his stories. They were conjured out of his head, tales that had little to do with the pictures in the book, the flying horses or the thieves in their treasure caves or the scruffy boy with his magic lamp. Monsieur told them not as the book might have, but as he saw them, jumping to life before his eyes.

This passage hints, or foreshadows, something of the man Octavio becomes. The imaginative “reading” instills Octavio’s passion for books and offers a glimpse into an affliction that eventually brings Isabeau Normande into his life.

The immigrant artist becomes one of my favourite characters. Even after being dismissed from studying, he draws obsessively, mostly in the park in all kinds of weather. CS Richardson paints pictures with words, and as this scene his sparse words show us what Kalb sketches:

Jacob Kalb, a stuffed carpetbag under his feet and his knees under his chin, hurried a last sketch of the old woman across the aisle. Since crossing into France he had managed a passable likeness of the woman’s pocked cheeks, the creases around her puffy mouth. In small vignettes he had made studies of her hands and their bouquets of arthritic fingers. On the page her hair looked like lengths of wire exploding from under her hat.

 Richardson creates scene after scene that unveil the community, allowing us to see inside the hearts and actions of his characters. For example, the Fournier family run a bookstall that reflects both the bookstall and, in many ways, the neighbourhood:

The Fournier bookstall held too much poetry, mixed its philosophies with its mechanics and its travelogues among its fictions.

But the eclectic bookstall is more than a metaphor for the varied personalities of the community. It provides the pivot that creates change involving both Octavio and the scarred Isabeau Normande. In subtle ways, by the end of the novel Richardson seamlessly places all the puzzle pieces together, creating a unified whole.

The Emperor of Paris is like a fable brimming with magical, imaginative images not unlike the Arabian Nights except for the specificity of place and time. Richardson’s tale created a movie that ran across the screen of my mind, an ultimately satisfying movie made with perfect words.

15 The Emperor of Paris

Available through your local bookstore or online: The Emperor of Paris