02/29/2016
Seasoned readers James Langton, Henry Layva, and Robert Petkoff offer a pleasant melding of male voices in this vividly imagined and historical epic about two giants of the 19th century. Polly Lee does all the female voices; many of the women sound too much alike and are too high-pitched and irritating, but Lee is excellent in her main role as the famous bohemian painter Dorothy Tennant, the wife of famed explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley. The book centers on Stanley’s extraordinary trajectory from a poverty-stricken Welsh orphan to a world-renowned explorer. It also features Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, who was friends with Stanely during the late 19th century. Hijuelos uses their books, correspondence, and numerous newspaper accounts as a basis for this novel, his last before his death in 2013. The four readers create a satisfying ensemble for this surprising and well-told tale. A Grand Central hardcover. (Nov.)
Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise
Narrated by James Langton, Polly Lee, Henry Leyva, Robert Petkoff, Lori Marie Carlson Hijuelos
Oscar HijuelosUnabridged — 18 hours, 13 minutes
Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise
Narrated by James Langton, Polly Lee, Henry Leyva, Robert Petkoff, Lori Marie Carlson Hijuelos
Oscar HijuelosUnabridged — 18 hours, 13 minutes
Overview
Hijuelos was fascinated by the Twain-Stanley connection and eventually began researching and writing a novel that used the scant historical record of their relationship as a starting point for a more detailed fictional account. It was a labor of love for Hijuelos, who worked on the project for more than ten years, publishing other novels along the way but always returning to Twain and Stanley; indeed, he was still revising the manuscript the day before his sudden passing in 2013.
The resulting novel is a richly woven tapestry of people and events that is unique among the author's works, both in theme and structure. Hijuelos ingeniously blends correspondence, memoir, and third-person omniscience to explore the intersection of these Victorian giants in a long vanished world.
From their early days as journalists in the American West, to their admiration and support of each other's writing, their mutual hatred of slavery, their social life together in the dazzling literary circles of the period, and even a mysterious journey to Cuba to search for Stanley's adoptive father, Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise superbly channels two vibrant but very different figures. It is also a study of Twain's complex bond with Mrs. Stanley, the bohemian portrait artist Dorothy Tennant, who introduces Twain and his wife to the world of sv©ances and mediums after the tragic death of their daughter.
A compelling and deeply felt historical fantasia that utilizes the full range of Hijuelos' gifts, Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise stands as an unforgettable coda to a brilliant writing career.
Editorial Reviews
★ 09/07/2015
This vividly imagined and detailed epic about two giants of the 19th century is the product of over a decade of work; Hijuelos was still revising the manuscript up until his untimely death in 2013. In his late teens, the author became captivated by Sir Henry Morton Stanley and his extraordinary trajectory from a poverty-stricken Welsh orphan to a world-renowned explorer; Hijuelos also discovered that Stanley had a friendship with Mark Twain. Using third-person narrative, letters, and journal entries (all fabricated), and by bringing in Stanley’s wife, the painter Dorothy Tennant, as a foil between the two men, the author brilliantly breathes life into Victorian times. Particular focus is paid to Stanley’s early life in America, and an entirely concocted journey he took to Cuba with Twain in search of Stanley’s adoptive father and namesake. Stanley, formal and somewhat rigid, though certainly erudite and keen for adventure, contrasts with Twain, the more relaxed and gifted speaker whose humor endeared him to audiences around the world. The author depicts not only the peace of mind the two get from family life, but also their various setbacks—the financial trials beset by Twain and the heartbreaking family deaths he suffered, and the illnesses that plagued Stanley his whole life. Hijuelos’s death is made all the more poignant by an observation Stanley makes in an introduction for one of Twain’s speaking engagements: “Our literature is our legacy, and if there is such a thing as ghosts, literature will be the only verifiable version of them.” How lucky we are to have this rich novel. (Nov.)
"Oscar Hijuelos, who left us suddenly and far too soon, has been deeply missed by those of us who were his friends-missed both as a friend and as a writer. The friend will not be coming back, but what a miracle that he has given us this last novel-which is a fine and wonderful novel, and surely among the best books Oscar ever wrote."—Paul Auster
"The great Oscar Hijuelos lives on in this ambitious, fascinating, and richly detailed work that, like the author, is in a class by itself."—Gay Talese
"TWAIN & STANLEY ENTER PARADISE is a natural and delightful extension of Hijuelos' work, and like his earlier books, this one is distinguished by vitality so intense as to give the reader a charge just picking up the book. . . . a voice that is haunting and mesmerizing, and a story that shows just how fantastic and enjoyable Oscar Hijuelos' imagination really was."—Craig Nova, author of The Good Son
"What a wonder to have Oscar Hijuelos return from the celestial beyond with a tale that is thoroughly of this world and firmly anchored in history! TWAIN & STANLEY ENTER PARADISE is a marvelous blend of research and the imagination, resurrecting two fascinating contemporaries-Mark Twain and Henry Morton Stanley-and lending a bygone era the shimmer of here and now."—Marie Arana, author of American Chica, Cellophane, and Bolívar: American Liberator.
"An extraordinary feat of imaginative historical re-creation."—Booklist (starred review)
"This book is good news for Hijuelos fans."—Kirkus
"Vividly imagined and detailed epic...How lucky we are to have this rich novel."—Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"The final masterpiece by the Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer....Twain fans, get ready."—Huffington Post
"A magical story."—David Baldacci, CBS Sunday Morning
"So sad that this is our last Hijuelos novel, so fabulous that we have it."—Library Journal (starred review)
"A brilliant posthumous capstone."—EW.com
04/01/2016
The posthumously published final novel of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Hijuelos is a thoroughly researched but fictionalized tale of the relationships between Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), explorer Henry Morton Stanley, and Dorothy Stanley, Henry's artistic and aristocratic wife. The tale follows Twain and Stanley together on a trip to Cuba before either was famous, through the years of their acquaintance in post-Civil War America and Victorian England, and up until the secrets of the Cuba trip are revealed to Dorothy by Twain after her husband's death. The work focuses more on Stanley than on Twain and examines themes of love, friendship, family, religion, death, pain, and paradise. The narration is high quality and headlined by James Langton. Hijuelos's wife reads both the author's note and her very touching afterword. VERDICT Highly recommended for fans of literary fiction, popular history, romantic historical fiction, and adventure. ["Succeeds in conjuring a bygone era from rural 19th-century Cuba to upper-class London society": LJ 10/15/15 starred review of the Grand Central hc.]—Tristan M. Boyd, Austin, TX
★ 10/15/2015
This absorbing and luminous novel by the late Hijuelos, which he was still editing at the time of his death, reimagines the friendship between Mark Twain and British explorer Henry David Stanley. Here, Stanley winds up in New Orleans in the mid-1800s and meets Twain on a riverboat when both are young men. They strike up a friendship based on a mutual love of reading and literature and become closer when they journey together to Cuba directly before the start of the American Civil War to seek out Stanley's sort-of adoptive father, afterward going their separate ways. The novel focuses more on Stanley, seen here as an interesting and enigmatic character who late in life marries the beautiful, much younger, upper-class Dorothy Tennant, an artist. While Twain endures the unexpected death of his daughter and the long decline of his wife, Livy, Stanley suffers from various maladies contracted in Africa; after his death, his wife publishes his autobiography, parts of which make up the narrative. VERDICT The novel, which contains letters, speeches, fragments of Stanley's autobiography, diary entries, and dialog, all of which Hijuelos evidently created, succeeds in conjuring a bygone era from rural 19th-century Cuba to upper-class London society. Well written and engaging, this novel may lack some of the fire of the author's best-known work, but it is a intriguing entry in his output and will appeal to his fans and those who enjoy historical fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 5/11/15.]—James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.
This mostly epistolary novel tracks the real and imagined friendship of Samuel Clemens (author Mark Twain) and Henry Morton Stanley (African explorer) from their meeting on a Mississippi riverboat before the Civil War through the end of their lives. Clemens, Stanley, and Stanley’s wife— painter Dorothy Tennant—are the main voices, ably performed by the ensemble of narrators. Henry Leyva captures the charming and tragic elder Clemens, and—more remarkably—James Langton, the bull-headed and searching Stanley. The vividly rendered Tennant—read by Polly Lee—matches both for energy and passion. Robert Petkoff ably covers the narration and other major characters. A meditation on Anglo-American imperial culture in the late nineteenth century, the story meanders from Cuba to the Congo. F.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
2015-08-03
Posthumous publication of an ambitious, atypical historical novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. When Hijuelos (The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, 1989, etc.) died of a heart attack in the fall of 2013, he had been working for more than a dozen years on this 19th-century epic concerning the unlikely but close friendship of two of the most famous men in America. They had met working on a riverboat, a couple of aspiring writers, well before one would travel to Africa in search of Dr. Livingstone and the other would become a beloved humorist under the pen name of Mark Twain. Since Hijuelos has long been known for voluptuary narratives of Cuba and Cuban America, filled with song and sex, the Victorian primness of the various tones he employs here stands in stark contrast (though a trip to Cuba proves pivotal). The novel encompasses long stretches of unpublished manuscripts purportedly written by Stanley and his wife, as well as extended correspondence between each of them and Twain. Stanley had been an orphan taken under the wing of a benefactor (whose surname the young man took), and there's a sense throughout that the way Stanley portrays his life is not the way it actually transpired. With Stanley's health and that of Twain's wife in parallel decline, there's a hint of romantic triangle, what Dorothy Stanley calls "some kind of autumnal infatuation," though history left that attraction unrequited, as she remarried shortly after her husband's death. The meditations on time and death in the book's last third are particularly poignant given the author's own untimely passing, but the whole of the novel is unwieldy, with awkward dialogue ("I am wondering what you can tell me about yourself") and juxtapositions (a section titled "Clemens in That Time" follows Lady Stanley's extended account of her husband's death). An Afterword by Hijuelos' widow explains that he was working on the novel up to his death, having written "thousands of pages that he attempted to winnow down to publishable size, even as he continued to expand upon the story." This book is good news for Hijuelos fans, but considering its flaws, it's tantalizing to think of what it would have been like if the author had managed to finish it himself.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940170292516 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hachette Audio |
| Publication date: | 11/03/2015 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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