Reviews for Beautiful Maria of My Soul

The average rating for Beautiful Maria of My Soul based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-08-15 00:00:00 Mario Williams Neto God, this was dreadful. The only way this book could have been more a straight male fantasy is if it had been narrated by a penis'and believe me, there enough descriptions of improbably huge penises in Beautiful María of my Soul that such a narrative device wouldn't have been an enormous stretch. The protagonist, María, is a man's bland idea of a beautiful woman; I never believed in her as a real person. Her great love affair with Nestor seems to be based mostly on the fact that they're both good looking and he has an enormous penis'and this sexist pap carries on for 300 pages. The prose is also pretty terrible. Hijuelos seems to think that peppering his prose with italicised words in Spanish every other sentence is a good alternative to actually creating atmosphere and texture. Some words are not translatable into English, true, but Hijuelos delights in things like having his characters say "Muy bien. Very good," when they are ostensibly speaking Spanish all the time. The final straw was the ending, in which the author inserts himself as a character (polite and modest and self-effacing!) who helps to tie up the last few strands of the narrative. It read as obnoxious. Really, really not recommended.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-04-09 00:00:00 Michael King Bravo Hijuelos!! I flat out LOVED this book! For the first time in a long time finishing a book left me sorry it was over. What am I going to read next that will go down that smoothly? The book is the story of the beautiful love interest from The Mambo Kings Sing Songs Of Love. It that book she was a peripheral but important character in that she was the inspiration for a hit song, the title of which is Beautiful Maria Of My Soul, written by Nestor Castillo, one of two brothers who are the focus of Mambo Kings. She is a beauty of mythical quality and the book indeed has a mythical air about it. She, for example, is rarely, perhaps never, referred to as Maria, she is always Beautiful Maria in the narrative. Beautiful Maria Of My Soul starts with Maria leaving the small village in Cuban countryside where she was born and going to Havana, and as mundane as that sounds, I was hooked from the first sentence. The book is the story of a long journey that as a reader we can take with her. Hijuelos is a very skillful and clever writer. He mingles real events and personalities (even himself!) into the story and creates a novel that takes on life. The one criticism that a lot of readers seem to have is the somewhat graphic sex scenes. They didn't bother me at all and Hijuelos, speaking as himself in the novel and referring to this matter says they are "...presented with a redeeming romantic touch." I agree.