Thoughts Without Cigarettes: A Memoir

A modest yet inspired look back at his Manhattan upbringing by Cuban immigrants takes Pulitzer Prize%E2%80%93winning Hijuelos from the early 1950s through the extraordinary success of his second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Hijuelos's memoir, at times verbose, is very much a tender tribute to his parents. A campesino who immigrated to New York City in the early 1940s and worked as a short-order cook at the Biltmore Men's Bar, his "pop" was a largehearted man who loved to entertain his Cuban friends and eat and drink heartily; his voluble, anxious mother, from an upper-middle-class Cuban family, accompanied her new husband to America and remained fairly isolated in their Morningside Heights apartment, without English or job prospects, growing increasingly disgruntled by her husband's big-spending, lady-killing ways. The defining event of Hijuelos's childhood was his contracting deadly nephritis at age four while on a trip home to Cuba with his mother. Not only was he hospitalized for nearly a year and put on a strict diet for most of his childhood, but the illness, termed his "Cuban disease," also caused a rupture from his maternal language and his sense of being Cuban. Gradually he educated himself at City College, winning enthusiastic mentors like Donald Barthelme and Frederic Tuten, and transforming this awkward, rudderless "work in progress" into a gracious writer of well-deserved stature. (June)