FFWD Weekly
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| Books by Gaelle Eizlini Empress Of The Splendid Season Pulitzer prize-winning author Oscar Hijuelos’s new novel, Empress of the Splendid Season, takes us through the life of Lydia Espana, a New York City cleaning woman. Lydia was born to a rich respectable family in pre-Castro Cuba, and is thrown out of her home by her father when he learns that she has not been behaving the way a daughter of his ought to. Vain, spoiled and beautiful, Lydia has been playing the field, so out she must go. Hijuelos’s novel is not an edge of your seat page-turner, but a rambling meditation of a life that hasn’t turned out quite the way it ought to. As a novelist, Hijuelos’s strength lies in his ability to make ordinary people’s everyday concerns come alive without seeming contrived. Lydia has not been prepared in the slightest way for making a living, much less as a servant. He perfectly captures the tone of seething indignation of a cleaning woman being treated like a lower form of life by people who cannot clean up after themselves, her longing for the kind of life she knew as a young woman, the stress of having to make ends meet and still keep up appearances. Hijuelos’s strength is also one of his faults; while he is intimate enough with the psychology of his characters, he seems to lose interest just as easily. Lydia’s daughter is set aside about halfway through the novel. Lydia’s husband Raul’s first son makes a sudden appearance and then just as quickly disappears. The characters are so finely traced that it becomes disappointing to meet and lose them so easily. Ultimately, it is Lydia’s story and how her world unfolds, and it is not hard to become immersed in the tenderness that Hijuelos feels for so manifestly flawed a woman as Lydia. GAELLE EIZLINI |
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