The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez

The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez

256 pages

Published Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories, doesn’t want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories—literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her. 

 Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas and soon begin to defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener to the secret tales unspooled by Alma's characters. Among them, Bienvenida, dictator Rafael Trujillo's abandoned wife who was erased from the official history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.
 
The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories. Julia Alvarez reminds us that the stories of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.

My Thoughts: 

A little more than five years ago, my husband and I went to hear Julia Alvarez speak. At that time, I had a couple of her books on my to-be-read list, but hadn't actually read anything she'd written. I was so impressed with her that I knew I needed to rectify that. This is now my third of her books and I've several things to be true of her books: 

• The themes of family (especially sisters), the immigrant experience, home, and storytelling will appear. 
• The writing will be beautiful. 
• The book will make me really think and I'm bound to learn from it. 
• It's possible that I may feel like I'm in over my head. 

This book was no exception. I'll admit to wondering, in the beginning, if this book might be more cerebral than what I was up to when I began reading. But I also knew that I wanted to see how it would play out so I continued reading and Alvarez began pulling me in, even when it became apparent that magical elements were going to be involved (and you all know how tricky that it for me!). 

For a bit I felt pulled about, from one person's story to another's, from Alma's story to Filomena's story. Gradually they became one and the need for that background for each of them became apparent as the stories told by those buried characters begin to emerge. 

Manuel Cruz is Alma's father, a man who long ago spoke of a of mysterious place, a place his daughters mocked him about. Then one day he stopped speaking of it and, as he slipped into dementia, he stopped telling his girls anything about his past. 

Bienvenida is based on the real wife of Rafael Trujillo. Her she is a woman who gets swept up in the make-believe world Trujillo creates in wooing her and remains blind to the person he really is until she is forced to leave the country so that he can marry a new woman who can give him children. 

Filomena is a woman who grew up in the slums, whose mother abandoned her as a child and whose father was abusive. She and her sister, Perla, get tricked into coming into the city and working as maids for a wealthy family. When Perla becomes pregnant by the family's son, they are forced to marry. When he lands in trouble for going against Trujillo, the young family is sent to New York City and Filomena is deprived of the sister she's become estranged from and her beloved nephew. 

As Filomena listens to the stories in the cemetery, we begin to see how Alma's father's, Bienvenida's, and, eventually, Filomena's mother's stories are intertwined. 

As the book moved between the stories told by the characters in the cemetery and the real lives of Alma and Filomena, I never found myself confused or trying to race through one story to get to the next. For me, everything was laid out and unfolded perfectly. I grew to care deeply about these characters, even those who were more deeply flawed. In just 256 pages, Alvarez took me from doubting this book to wishing it were longer, not because it didn't feel complete; but because I wanted to hear more of the stories.