This intriguing novel begins with the description of a friendship between Alma Cruz, a well-known novelist, and a famous black writer referred to only as “a friend.” Alma wonders if her friend stays in touch with her only so she can learn about white culture for her writing. (Long before Toni Morrison said it, her friend responded to a complaint about the obscurity of black dialect: “I don’t write for white people.”)
For years the friend works on a magnum opus: she travels around the world because the“reception” of the voices of her characters is clearer in their native countries.
But very little is written down. Her mental health noticeably deteriorates, as she becomes paranoid about agents, editors, and publishers. She has no address and is essentially homeless. Eventually, she is incarcerated in a mental hospital by her family.
Alma is ambivalent. Her brilliant friend boosted Alma’s career, when she insisted that Alma should write under the pen name, Schehezerade. The exotic name attracted readers. And her friend’s heritage and attention to voices lives on in Alma, who, like her friend, experiences the frustration of not being able to finish stories and novels in her early seventies.
Who isn’t hooked by a novel about storytelling? I fell into this novel with great pleasure, thrilled to read another book by Julia Alvarez. Alvarez’s debut novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, was my introduction to the voices of Latina culture. I am a great fan of Isabel Allende, Carolina de Robertis, and Ada Limón, among others.
And this book is about voices, exploring her mad friend’s ideas that we need to pay attention to the voices even of unfinished or lost stories. . After Alma’s parents die, she moves back to the Dominican Republic to build a “Cemetery of Untold Stories.” She has inherited a junk-covered piece of land from her parents. Here she buries her fragments of novels and unfinished stories, which are based on the lives of historical characters, among them her Dominican immigrant parents and Bienvenida, the wife of the dictator, Rafale Trajillo, who divorced her, banished her to the U.S., and briefly separated her from her daughter.
The most endearing character, and I would argue the main character, is the illiterate groundskeeper of the cemetery, Filomena, who listens to the voices of the characters in the forgotten stories and learns herself to tell stories. One of her duties is to sit beside each “grave marker” (sculptures designed by a Dominican artist) and listen to the voices. The characters’ tragic stories often end with hope, but not always. At any rate, they help her face the seemingly hopeless imprisonment of her sister, Perla, a woman muted by the crime she has committed.
Throughout the novel, characters worry not about madness, as they would in a 19th-century novel, but about dementia. In Alma’s family, both parents suffered from dementia in old age, and after their father’s death, Alma and her three sisters learn that he paid monthly sums to care for a woman their age with dementia. (This woman also has a place in the Cemetery of Untold Stories, though the sisters do not know this.)
I sped through this enjoyable novel, not Alvarez’s best, not quite as lyrical as some of her early work, but sufficiently well-written, well-plotted, short, fast, and haunting.
This would make a great summer read as soon as you set up your hammock or patio furniture. It would also make a good book club read.
By the way, Alvarez won the 2013 National Medal of the Arts, presented to her by Obama.