Julia Alvarez’s newest novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories (2024) was a delight! I so loved her In the Time of the Butterflies and Afterlife that I knew I couldn’t miss this one.
Alma, the celebrated writer known as Scheherazade, is in the twilight of her career, and has boxes and boxes of unfinished drafts of stories. She is worried that she’s going to end up like a dear friend, who was so obsessed with finishing a novel that she ended up in a mental hospital.
When her father passes, she and her three sisters inherit several properties in the Dominican Republic. After much discussion about a fair method of distribution, she inherits a fairly large parcel that is adjacent to a town dump and a barrio. She decides to use it to create a cemetery for her unfinished stories, to lay the characters to rest. A sculptor friend will create sculptures to honor the characters.
At the gate of the property, Alma places a bell with the words “Tell Me a Story” and if the entry seeker tells a worthy story, the gate will open. One of the early entrants is Filomena, a middle-aged woman who spent her life caring for others, who lives in the barrio across the street. As she wanders the sculpture garden, the characters in the buried stories speak to her. Doña Alma hires her as the caretaker, to make sure the sculptures are cleaned of bird poop and keep the teenagers out while Alma is in the United States.
Through Filomena, we hear the stories of Bienvenida, one of dictator Trujillo’s abandoned wives, and Alma’s Papi, Dr. Manuel Cruz, a resistor to Trujillo’s regime who knew Bienvenida and emigrated to the United States. We also hear Filomena’s story, and that of her sister, who went to the United States with an untrustworthy man, but raised a literary professor son.
I think Alvarez did a masterful job weaving everything together–there were some coincidences but not too many, and I loved the characters. It was also free from anti-fat bias so I consider it weight-neutral.
Reading While Fat 