This book is beautifully written. I love Hijuelos' style. He has a gift for painting an image of another era and imbuing it with all the sounds, smells and sensations that go along with it. His characters are heartbreakingly real flawed human beings. I loved the musicality of his prose. And the melancholic memories of an old man and former musician who once enjoyed semi- fame and admiration. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is about many things: family, love, lust, Cuban culture, the life of musicians, food, women, dance, mourning, life choices, and mortality. It follows the life trajectory of the Castillo brothers, Cesar and Nestor who put together a band, The Mambo Kings, and who eventually rise to a level of fame through Nestor's song, Beautiful Maria of My Soul. If I have any criticism, it is that the sexual descriptions get to be excessive. Admittedly, the reader feels Cesar Castillo's decline in old age and his confrontation with the realization of his own mortality, all the more. Upon completing the book though, I realized why it won a Pulitzer. The way Hijuelos weaves his tale in and out of beautiful and sad memories of the past and the present, and the way he makes you care about the Castillo's is really...something. I lack the proper term.