Burying fragments of unfinished stories brings them to life in Julia Alvarez’s new novel
Julia Alvarez’s “the Cemetery of untold stories” is a book about the power of narratives and the way they shape us. engaging and written in a playful, crystal-clear prose, this novel explores friendship, love, sisterhood, living between cultures, and how people can be haunted by the things they don’t finish.
Alma Cruz always wanted to be a famous author. After years of work — many of them spent toiling in the shadow of her best friend, a famous novelist — Alma gets her wish. under the pen name scheherazade, Alma spends decades publishing books and working as a professor. After the death of her parents, Alma and her sisters argue — as they do about everything — about how to split the small plots of land they inherited, all of which are in the dominican Republic, their homeland.
Alma selects the plot no one seems to want, a lot in a bad neighborhood and too close to the city dump. At first, she doesn’t know what to do with her land, but soon comes up with an idea: to turn the land into a cemetery where she can literally bury the pieces of paper left behind by the stories she never finished. Alma stops writing, tells her literary agent she’s done, and sells her house. With boxes full of unfinished manuscripts, Alma and her friend brava — a small woman with inordinately large hands who is also an artist and convinces Alma to add her work to the cemetery project — move into the small house Alma built on her land. together, the writer and the artist start to put to rest, and to commemorate with statues and headstones, the narratives Alma never wrote.
but characters in stories can also become ghosts, and Alma’s stories become real voices that argue, talk back, and reinvent themselves while haunting anyone who comes close to them. filomena, a local woman Alma hires to help with the cemetery, sometimes visits the headstones as part of her work, and she soon starts to hear the voices. full of sad, unfinished stories herself, filomena kindly pays attention to the ghosts of Alma’s characters — her own family, mostly, but also the abandoned first wife of dictator Rafael trujillo, who was erased from history, and a doctor who escaped to the united states. the voices want to tell their stories, and someone must listen.
A literary pioneer known for breaking ground in terms of centering the experiences of latinx women and writing bilingually, Alvarez does so again here. Alma, filomena, and the other women in their lives share the spotlight to shed a light on a multiplicity of female experiences across a wide socioeconomic spectrum as well as between dominican and American cultures. And it happens in two languages: “When affection brimmed over, it spilled into spanish.”
While things get dark — some men are horrible, and women suffer and lose their kids — the narrative never feels preachy. in fact, this is a playful novel in which Alvarez digs deep into popular sayings and barrio politics while also giving her characters names that, when translated, add even more depth to the story: Alma (soul), Amparo (protection), tesoro (treasure), piedad (piety), Consuelo (comfort/to console).
besides being entertaining and tackling some important subjects like misogyny, migration, infidelity, and injustice with humor and grace, “the Cemetery of untold stories” accomplishes one more thing that deserves attention: a deep self-awareness that permeates every page. Alvarez looks at the pros and cons of being a writer in a way that feels like she’s sharing her own experiences and confessing that there are stories that haunt her. like Alvarez, Alma writes about her people, her family, and feels she’s “usurping stories from her familia and homeland to serve as savories for the first World’s delectation.” At the end, one message remains: Alvarez has seen it all as an author, but her love for telling stories remains as big as ever. “in the time of the butterflies,” perhaps Alvarez’s best-known novel, was published three decades ago. now, some of the same elements, including women and trujillo, are still here, and Alvarez still manages to make them feel fresh.
Heartwarming and slightly surreal, “the Cemetery of untold stories” forces readers to question whose stories get to be told, and what happens to those whose stories remain unspoken. the “only way to enter” the cemetery of untold stories “is to speak into a small black box at the front gate. Cuéntame, a woman’s soft voice requests. Tell me a story. only then does the door open, or not.” And Alvarez does, and the door opens. through it, we find decades of family drama, love, loss, grief, and new beginnings. Alvarez is telling her stories, and just like filomena, all we have to do is listen.