OUR HOUSE IN THE LAST WORLD

by Oscar Hijuelos ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 8, 1983

Comparable to David Plante's dark and lacerated The Family, Hijuelos' debut is a novel about family despair that becomes family psychosis. His clan: the Santinios--who come to New York from rural Cuba in 1944, promptly to find. . . very little. The father is Alejo, who secures a job he then holds for the rest of his life, as an ill-paid cook in a Waldorf-like hotel; highstrung wife Mercedes bears two sons, Horacio and Hector; and all of them live together in a Morningside Heights apartment building. ("". . . marble walls and steps and columns and two vast mirrors that reflected one another endlessly. When the sun spread into the hallway, it filled the mirrors with a radiant cheeriness that eventually receded into a pit of darkness. Way back in the depths, shadows entangled like forest briars and faces seemed to appear."") Alejo grows obese, becoming a physically abusive alcoholic, a philanderer. Mercedes, dreamy of nature, parlays a sister-in-law's hatred into a crazy screechiness of paranoid fear. Horacio becomes a violent street-kid. Hector, fat like his father, picks up an infection during a 1950s visit home to Cuba and nearly dies later, back in the States, from kidney failure; given up as a terminal case, his Spanishness is scraped from him by a sadistic nurse. In all, then, there is no winning for these people: ""The drunk in the kitchen, the lunatic mother in the back room lying in the bed in the dark, the fucked-up brother."" There is also no escape from the past. Indeed, what gives this novel its pulsing power, along with the waves of domestic horror and hopelessness, is the implicit Cuban acceptance of ghosts--not supernatural presences, but natural (if intangible) reminders that a family never loses its basic identity. And Hijuelos finds both the lyrical and bleak elements in this grim, haunted family legacy--with a strong first novel marked by eloquently trimmed prose, great assurance, and uncompromising darkness.

Pub Date: June 8, 1983

ISBN: 089255374X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Persea

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1983

Categories: FICTION