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View ProfilesPublished May 15, 2024 at 10:00 a.m.
In Weybridge author Julia Alvarez's abundantly populated new novel, an aging writer named Alma, who publishes under the nom de plume Scheherazade, decides to call it quits. She leaves Vermont and returns to her childhood home in the Dominican Republic, claiming a plot of derelict land she's inherited but never seen. Her plan is to build a cemetery there, where she can entomb her never-completed book manuscripts:
She needed a place to bury her unfinished work, a space honoring all those characters who had never had the chance to tell their stories. She wanted to bring them home to their mother tongue and land.
In her readiness to be freed of artistic obligations, she may remind readers of William Shakespeare's Prospero, who, at the close of The Tempest, renounces his powers and vows to "drown my book."
From this elegiac premise, the novel travels in numerous directions and widens to incorporate the stories of a dozen or more people whose histories and destinies adjoin. At first we expect Alma to be the novel's main character, but others steadily move to the foreground. The novelist Alma — like the novelist Alvarez — glides offstage to a vantage point where she can observe and record in a compound narrative that spans generations.
Alvarez, the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and 11 books for children and young adults, was a writer in residence at Middlebury College until her retirement in 2016. Her accolades are legion. Her 1994 novel In the Time of the Butterflies, with over 1 million copies in print, was selected for the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read program. In 2013, president Barack Obama awarded Alvarez the National Medal of Arts.
In many specific respects, Alma resembles her creator. They've both achieved significant literary success, among critics and scholars and also among everyday readers. Like the character Yolanda in Alvarez's first book, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991); like the character Antonia in her previous novel Afterlife (2020); and like Alvarez herself, Alma has three sisters. And also like her fictional protagonists in those previous books, Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States as a child — her family escaped the oppressive regime of dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1960.
Alvarez's Afterlife was a lovely, thought-provoking novel that moved back and forth between two distinct storylines connected through Antonia, the book's main character. The Cemetery of Untold Stories has considerably more complicated plotting, braiding four separate narratives and skillfully shifting among the perspectives of six characters. Alma must negotiate with her fractious and feisty sisters and a family lawyer to resolve a financial riddle their father, Manuel Cruz, left unsolved when he died. When Manuel takes a turn as the novel's narrator, his voice speaks from one of Alma's buried manuscripts, and we learn about his lifelong loneliness and the reasons for his secrecy.
His story is overheard by Filomena, an illiterate housekeeper who becomes the caretaker of Alma's cemetery. Alvarez also gives us Filo's sister Perla's point of view for several episodes; having fled to New York with a lover, she's pulled into a morass of infidelity and violence.
Pepito, son of Perla, also comes to the fore. He has grown up to be a professor, an expert reader of Alma's writings, yet lives partly hidden as a gay man in a cruelly macho family culture.
Another narrator overheard from an abandoned manuscript is the wounded but delightful Doña Bienvenida, cast-off wife of the tyrant Trujillo, whose story Alma had long hoped to write but never could figure out how.
The confluence of many different viewpoints, and the fugue-like shifts among perspectives, give the Cemetery of Untold Stories a spellbinding breadth and historical range. Stylistically, Alvarez's writing is intricate and assured. She omits quotation marks from the dialogue, giving the narrative a pleasingly pell-mell speed. Alvarez also frequently stirs Spanish words and phrases into her vivacious narration:
The policewoman gestures with her chin, bunching her lips, a gesture that confirms she is indeed a quisqueyana. Ahí mismo, señora, she says, kindly escorting Perla to the subway stairs, explaining which trains to take to the Bronx. They chat for a few minutes, Perla como si nada, the young woman talking in Spanglish like Perla's Dominican-york sons.
This could be taxing for an English-only reader, but often it's easy to glean meanings by the similarity of cognates (pasaporte: passport, secreto: secret, desespere: despair), by context or because a translation is inlaid in the phrasing: "Por favor, he begs, sobbing, please."
This reader kept a Spanish dictionary at hand, not because referencing one was necessary to enjoy the story, but because it was even more enjoyable to look up unfamiliar words and catch the added resonance. For instance, sinvergüenza means scoundrel, and chismes is gossip. And surely a reader conversant in Spanish will be pleased by the ways the two languages flirt and dance together here.
The novel's most quietly consequential character is Filomena, so modest and discreet that she lives almost unnoticed by everyone else. But her story, which Alvarez follows from childhood to the present, reveals that she is a magnificent listener. It is she who can hear reverberant, confiding voices from the ashes of the cemetery's burned manuscripts, and especially from the two cartons containing drafts that (magically) wouldn't burn — the stories of dictator Trujillo's cast-off wife Bienvenida and of Alma's father, Manuel, whose tragedies were never shared while he was alive. Alma deeply regrets not having finished those books, and the poignancy of that failure is sharpened by the disclosure — to Filomena, and to the reader — of a bond between Bienvenida and Manuel that Alma never learns about.
Alvarez is acknowledging and mourning the fragmentary drafts every writer hauls along through the years. But Alma's unfinished stories are alive, and their protagonists are not ghosts but enigmatic — and enduring — creations. Even as Alma herself gives way to silence, her characters keep speaking.
It may be helpful, while reading, to make a little chart of who is who among the characters, grouped by family. You can use this as a bookmark. As Alvarez gradually reveals the crisscrossing relationships, the reader is allowed to understand sooner and more clearly than the characters themselves how their histories are connected.
Most of the novel's characters never do see these connections, meaning that as readers, we become the recipients and caretakers of the marvelous tales bequeathed by Alma's cemetery. Though she has foresworn the authorial struggle, her characters — in ways both supernatural and emotionally plausible — will not accept silence.
This is not to be a run-of-the-mill cemetery, but a place of much respeto y orden. No riffraff, no freeloaders. As for spirits and ghosts, there'd be none of those either, as this is not to be a cemetery for people.
¿Para mascotas, entonces? Those who work as maids and gardeners know firsthand how attached the rich are to their pets. When their little dogs die, the owners mourn them more than they do other people's children. But generally, these pets are buried on the grounds of their owners' estates.
The foreman shakes his head. No, the cemetery is not for pets either.
But if not for people or animals, who is it for?
This is as much as the foreman has been told. All he knows is that he has never felt happier in a job. For the first time since he became a foreman, he pitches in, working the backhoe, removing stones alongside his Haitian crew. He leaves the job refreshed, no need to stop on the way home at the barra or colmado and pick up a bottle of ron and drown himself in forgetfulness, ignoring his mujer and swatting at his kids if they make too much noise. Instead, he converses openly with his wife and children, remembering things he has forgotten. Amorcito, his wife teases, did you eat parrot for your almuerzo today?
The original print version of this article was headlined "From the Ashes | Book review: The Cemetery of Untold Stories, Julia Alvarez"
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