Book Friends Forever

A Simple Habana Melody By Oscar Hijuelos, Read By Fabio Tassone (Audiobook Excerpt)

By Oscar Hijuelos Foreword by Arturo O’Farrill Read by Fabio Tassone From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos comes a “massively engaging…masterpiece of history, music, wonder, and sorrow” about a composer returning to his beloved homeland after WWII (Kirkus, starred review). The year is 1947. Israel Levis, a Cuban composer whose life once revolved around music and love, is finally returning home. En route to Habana, Cuba from Spain, he is a shadow of his former self, disillusioned after he was mistakenly sent to a camp during the Nazi occupation of France.In Habana, he escapes his anguish by reminiscing about his happiest moments before the war, when he lived a life of pleasure and excitement—and had a loving, if unrequited romance with Rita Valladares, the alluring singer who inspired Levis’ most famous composition, “Rosas Puras.”A tender homage to music, art, and a vibrant country at the edge of modernity, "A Simple Habana Melody" is a melodic, virtuoso performance from one of America’s most talented writers.

Duration:: 3m
Broadcast on:: 11 Feb 2025
Audio Format:: other

In the spring of 1947, when Israel levies, composer of that most famous of Rumbas, Rosas Puras, returned to Havana, Cuba, from Europe aboard the Esses Fortuna, those of his old friends who had not seen him in more than a decade were startled by his appearance. He was not yet sixty, but his hair had turned white, and he had grown and unruly be it, so that he resembled a forlorn guajiro of the countryside, or the painter Matisse in his later years. Peering out at the world through the distortions of his thick-lensed wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes seemed lost as if underwater, and he was gaunt, perhaps too frail, his expression and care-worn, and, in any event, beyond easy recognition. A bit of a joke, because during his heyday in the Havana of the 1920s and early 1930s, he had been quite tall and broad-shouldered, and so corpulent that while walking along the narrow side walks of Havana on his way to the music conservatory, or to the d'Adroelvisu, he would have to stand aside, his back pressed flatly against a wall, or duck into a doorway to allow the ladies with their Barasolis and beaded purses to pass. So great was his girth and imposing physicality that with his trademark moustache he reminded his friends of the silent film comedian Oliver Hardy, El Gordo, of El Gordo-Yel Flacko, the fat one, and the skinny one, which had become one of his affectionately intended nicknames, an appellation that he, in his good nature, and with his grand reputation, frequenting the bars and restaurants and concert halls of the city, had always taken in stride. But by the time El Gordo-Yellevi sailed past the Murro Castle and its lighthouse toward the rosified fortifications of La Bonta, and the glories of Havana proper, its blanched neoclassical facades as regulus cadaquenas, he had undergone certain transformations, for the events of his recent past had not been in keeping with the comforts and pleasures that his bourgeois existence in Paris and fame as a composer and orchestra leader had accustomed him to. With his stooping shoulders and bent back, he seemed to have shrunk to half his original size, and he had lost so much weight during the war that he now floated through the voluminous expanses of his old linen suits. In fact, he, whose idea of a diet had been to forego a second helping of cran brulee, or strawberry shortcake after a heavy five-course dinner in the Paris Ritz, was now as thin, if not thinner, then Stan Laurel, El Gordo's dim sidekick, and might have been called El Flaco, had the clock been turned back to his glory-days, and had the events of his recent years not seemed so tragic or confounding to his soul.