It’s rare for novelists to retire. If writers of fiction become successful, it seems, they keep on writing until death puts the period to them. Official retirement is so unusual that when Philip Roth announced in 2012 (six years before his death) that he’d chosen to stop writing, it caused a sensation.
Alma Cruz, the protagonist of “The Cemetery of Untold Stories,” the new novel by Julia Alvarez, makes the same choice. Writing under the pen name Scheherazade, Alma has had an accomplished publishing career, with a parallel job as an academic.
When she decides to retire from teaching, she tells herself, based in part on the implosion of a late friend’s literary career, that she’ll give up writing books as well. Seems sane and simple, but what Alma discovers is that some stories are not content to be discarded.
Like Alma, Alvarez was born in the Dominican Republic, moved to the United States with her family as a child and forged a career as a novelist with such bestselling books as “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” (1991) and “In the Time of the Butterflies” (1994). She’s also published children’s and YA books, poetry and nonfiction.
Her Dominican heritage and her family’s history, as well as her insight into family dynamics, have been important themes in her books, and they’re at the heart of this one.
In the years before Alma’s decision to retire, she and her energetic sisters, Amparo, Consuelo and Piedad, have been caring for their father, Manuel Cruz, a doctor with many secrets. After his death, Alma winds up with what seems like a paltry inheritance: a barren plot of land in a sketchy neighborhood in the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo.
But something draws her back to her homeland and to that spot. Soon she has hatched a plan to sell her comfy house in New England and build herself a modest casita on the land in Santo Domingo — amid a cemetery for the voluminous notes she has stored for books she has never written. She means, as she has to explain to many people, a literal cemetery, holes in the ground in which she’ll inter the ashes of her unfinished works.
Her passion for the project grows as she works with Brava, a talented and dynamic sculptor, who wants to create artworks as tombstones to express the themes of the buried stories. Everything proceeds pretty smoothly, except that two of the boxes of notes Alma has shipped from the U.S. refuse to catch fire.
One is full of notes she made for an unwritten book about her father, although she comes to realize she knows only “the small nation of Papí in the large continent of Manuel Cruz.”
The other holds her research for a historical novel about Bienvenida Inocencia Ricardo.
Never heard of her? Alma wouldn’t be surprised. Bienvenida was the first wife of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, a real-life monster who was the brutal dictator of the country from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. After he dumped Bienvenida because she couldn’t bear children and married his more fertile mistress, Trujillo had Bienvenida erased from history.
But Alma, whose childhood was spent under Trujillo’s rule, has heard stories about Bienvenida’s sweet and forgiving nature. The question she always wanted to explore was this: “How could such a good woman end up with the devil incarnate?”
Alma buries those two boxes of notes unburned. Until she can move onto the property herself, she hires a caretaker, a woman named Filomena who lives nearby.
Filomena is another sweet and forgiving character, despite the tragedies of her own life. She is also, it turns out, the perfect caretaker for Alma’s cemetery. Filomena is illiterate, but when she sits in meditation at the graves, the books’ subjects begin to speak to her.
“If you listen harder,” Alvarez writes, “beneath the hullabaloo of traffic and the noisy barrio, you’ll hear them, the diaspora of drafted characters returning to the ashes of their rough drafts.”
The novel’s focus shifts away for a while from Alma to the stories of her father and of Bienvenida, and of Filomena herself, and of the surprising connections among them. What emerges is a rich story of Dominican history, full of lush prose and quick wit, of love and loss, that Alvarez skillfully weaves back to Alma’s story in the present.
Stories, it seems, find a way to get themselves told. Let’s hope Alvarez has more to tell.
The Cemetery of Untold Stories
By Julia Alvarez
Algonquin Books, 256 pages, $25.20
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