I. Overview:
A Simple Habana Melody offers the reader insight into the subtitle, “when the world was good”.  Through an omnipotent narrator, one sees Israel Levis’ retrospective journey through his heyday as El Maestro during the turbulent, oppressive political climate of the Machado regime and the artistic renaissance in Cuba.  In the chapter, “He’d Written Out the Melody,” the author artfully shows the composer’s propensity for excess.  The statements, “Moderation was not in his heart” and “Levis voracious in his wish to consume the pleasures of this world,” seem to sum up his life during this period (68,85).  Levis literally and metaphorically gorges on life’s offerings during this decadent period of his life.  The author fills the narrative with imagery of the flora, fauna, people, and culture.  This tapestry of sights and sounds inspires Levis’ fictional compositions—evoking the idea that the music holds the history, flavor, sights, and sound of the population of Cuba.  However, the future tragedies of his life—his deportment and detainment in Buchenwald—are foreshadowed throughout these pages, especially his shortsightedness that made him feel immune to the capricious viciousness of the Nazis.  Subsequent to this part of the novel, Hijuelos includes a short chapter relating Rita Valladares’ point of view about her love for Levis as a man and composer, and her debut with “Rosas Puras”—a simple Habana melody written for her by Levis—for a world audience.  Levis’ love for Rita is reciprocated, if only in dreams and thought.
Analysis:
Hijuelos uses cultural elements to shape Levis’s simple Habana melodies.  In phraseology reminiscent of Plato, Levis describes himself (and his process of writing) as a passive receptor of God’s inspirations.  For instance, the narrator relates the myth that the sights, sounds, and smells “so inspired him that he quickly wrote the tune (“Rosas Puras”) on a paper napkin, its notes coming spontaneously to him, as from Heaven” (67).  Although one learns that this is simply a myth, Hijuelos makes sure this idea remains in the readers mind with, “He (Levis) believed that his body was but a receptacle for his create soul . . . ” (91).  Additionally, this image of divine influence arises from the perspectives of others, as when the barber describes Levis as one whose “whole being [is] imbued with the sense that he had been given by God a special purpose” (103).  This purpose is to give life to God’s inspiration.  To evoke this idea, the author aptly uses conception and birth imagery to show Levis as a secondary creator who is impregnated by the totality of his environment—Cuba.  Hijuelos uses the words “conception” and “brought into this world long ago” to describe Levis’ creation of “Rosas Puras”—his most famous yet haunting piece.
Likewise, the author employs imagery to suggests Levis’s community as a significant source of his music:
The tick tack rapping of the shoemaker’s hammer, brooms sweeping dust out of darkened entranceways, the cries of children playing in the gutter, the singsong chants of vendors selling newspapers . . . He heard music in the sonorous tinkle of water-splashed fountains, in the clip clop of horses hooves, in the clanging of church bells, in the straining voices of divines preaching the placitas on Sunday mornings (109).
The music of daily activity is only one element of inspiration from the island of Cuba.  The dominant music of Spain was infused and altered by the “African-influenced music” creating an unique Cuban sound all its own.  It took form in the voices of laundresses and cane workers who sang their Yoruban melodies aloud to pass the day, or to morn the death of a loved one to murder or war; it was played on bottles and pots and through whistles, empty crates and on coconut and conch shells.  It emulated the rivers, the wind through the treetops, the laughter of birds, the cackle of roosters.  It rattled like chains, and bled like a slaughtered animal. It was played by trios, by small drum and brass bands, by larger orchestras with trumpets and violins and flutes.  Its rhythms confounded, its vocals were chantlike and emphatic, its drumming wild (119-20).
Moreover, Levis finds inspiration in the beauty of the environment of Cuba itself.  Hijuelos shows the musical aspects of nature:
For their part, the trees, lined in rows along a receding green—for one could see the harbor in the distance—rustled in the breeze, and from their trunks came the music of sonorous violins; and the birds were as flutes; and the very flowers—the beds of roses and chrysanthemums around them, the bougainvillea lilting over the walls—sounded as bells (104-5).
Hijuelos’ use of sound imagery is excellent.  Not only does it enhance the story of this fictitious composer by immersing the reading with the sounds of Cuba, it also provides a proof of expertise of the author and lends to the legitimacy of the information he is imparting about his home country—a place many of his readers will only visit through the imagery he provides in his text.

Question 1:  How does Hijuelos combine real and fictitious artist’s references?
Question 2:  Why might Latino writes choose the non-linear form of narration?