The Cemetery of Untold Stories, Julia Alvarez, author; Alma Cuervo, narrator
The novel’s main character, Alma Cruz, begins her successful, clandestine writing life with the alias of Sheherazade, shortly after her mother objects to her telling stories about their lives and threatens to expose her. Her good friend, a highly successful author, sadly suffering from psychosis, is the one who suggests the change. Their friendship will become an untold story as their relationship diminishes with the increasing evidence of her madness.
As Sheherazade, further good fortune follows Alma; she gains success as a writer and also in a successful teaching career. When she retires, some four decades later, she leaves America, the country that had welcomed her and provided her a safe haven, to return to her homeland, the Dominican Republic. There she constructs a cemetery for all the stories she had never published, and all the stories revealed to her by visitors. Their silent stories are given voice, and a legacy, as they are buried in the hallowed ground that she has created. Through the stories she relates, truths are uncovered. The barbarism of the assassinated dictator, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, is exposed as well, as several female characters reveal their stories. The relationships between various characters are further explored through their stories, whether they were published or remain hidden in notebooks.
What seems at first to be several disparate stories, coalesce to form a novel that is also about the history of life in the Dominican Republic for those who loved and suffered from the love of their dictator. It is sometimes hard to tell which stories are told and which remain untold. Are they all still unfolding? This novel tells the stories that are rooted in both the life and the ancestry of the author, Julia Alvarez.
As Cruz tells the stories that explore the lives of all the characters that she was never able to put into print, they take on a life of their own. Their untold stories are stored in the boxes that she cherishes. She hires Sophie to organize them. She places Filomena Altogracia Moronto in charge of the stories, and Filomena listens to the new stories that unfold, as well. The characters will grow and shrink throughout the novel, and at times, it is hard to distinguish the supposed factual character from the fictional character, the real life of the author in the novel and the fictional life she creates. The novel, therefore, would be better in print, than in an audio, because some of the narrative feels disjointed and needs to be reread. It is hard to do that in an audio unless you do it at the moment it occurs, and sometimes, you are far beyond that point when you realize it is confusing.
In the end, everyone’s life is a tale of untold stories, secrets and memories. Alma stored all of these stories in her cemetery so they would live on, in a sense, though buried. Friendships and love affairs come and go, success can be fleeting, but the cemetery would remain as a sacred repository of undeveloped characters that never got to see the light of day or to appear in the pages of a book. This character, Alma Cruz, collected stories that represented the lives of all the characters that would have lived in her novel or in the novels of others who never published their tales. Everyone’s life contains stories too, and together, their tales occupied graves in the cemetery of stories, the place they could be honored and would live on, after a fashion.