When Raul Espana falls ill, his wife Lydia, who had enjoyed a life of luxury as the mayor's daughter in Cuba, finds herself cleaning the apartments of rich New Yorkers. Among her employers is Mr Osprey, a paragon of glamour and money who becomes involved in the lives of Lydia and her children.
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When Raul Espana falls ill, his wife Lydia, who had enjoyed a life of luxury as the mayor's daughter in Cuba, finds herself cleaning the apartments of rich New Yorkers. Among her employers is Mr Osprey, a paragon of glamour and money who becomes involved in the lives of Lydia and her children.
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Add this copy of Empress of the Splendid Season to cart. $0.99, good condition, Sold by BookHolders rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Gambrills, MD, UNITED STATES, published 2015 by Harper Perennial.
Add this copy of Empress of the Splendid Season to cart. $0.99, good condition, Sold by BookHolders rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Gambrills, MD, UNITED STATES, published 1999 by HarperCollins Publishers.
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Add this copy of Empress of the Splendid Season to cart. $1.26, very good condition, Sold by More Than Words rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Waltham, MA, UNITED STATES, published 1999 by HarperCollins Publishers.
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Good. Book Octavo, softcover. faint stain at bottom edge of first several pages else good in blue pictorial wraps. 342 pp. The story of Lydia Espana, an emigre from Cuba who works on Upper West Side of Manhattan as a cleaning woman to support husband and children. Author writes of love, the pulse of the city, and the complexity of what happens to generations of people who come to America...
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Very Good. Size: 6x1x9; Hardcover with dust jacket. Pages are clean and unmarked. Covers show very minor shelf wear. Dust jacket shows light edge wear. Binding is tight, hinges strong.; 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed! Ships same or next business day!
Oscar Hijuelos' Empress of the Splendid Season is told from the perspective of Lydia Espana, an "upper lower-class" Cuban American cleaning lady in Manhattan, and thus the disparities of wealth and class, ambitions achieved and thwarted, statuses acknowledged and ignored, are filtered through her immigrant experience. Boldly, the author's tale reverses the conventional arc of Horatio Alger novels and The American Dream. In fact Espana's movement is one of downward mobility, a story heard less often than the more consoling "success stories," yet nonetheless true, for example, of Korean professionals reduced to being greengrocers in part because of the language barrier.
The novel isn't big, capacious and exuberant like Hijuelos' The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, but the prose is more assured and avoids some of the tiresome repetitions that marred the earlier work. Still, any writer who has written a celebrated novel so bursting with life will inevitably suffer comparisons. New York Times critic Michio Kakutani called Empress an "attenuated" effort and ridden with class stereotypes, calling Osprey a one-dimensional caricature of a rich man.
I disagree. What's alive for me in the novel is Lydia Espana's interior existence, her reveries about a life of privilege in Cuba in contrast to her present condition, her alienation from her assimilated American-born children, her fractious marriage, and her persistent romantic longings. All ring true to me, and it is to Hijuelos' considerable credit that he had the nerve to create a novel around a working-class immigrant female character.
