The Cemetery of Untold Stories
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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.
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“how to exorcise a story that had never been told”
this is a book for people who need to write in order to exist
it is about immigrant experience, family hood and how the lives of our ancestors influence on our own lives, aka intergenerational transmission
the story is from different perspectives (past/present) with four main threads that converge and diverge within the story; julia alvarez bring all those threads together in a coherent and smoothly way
overall I really enjoyed this book, I would say that perhaps the audiobook is not the best way to consume this story, I recommend the physical book (even if the audio is great)
thank you netgalley for the copy
While an interesting concept of laying untold stories to rest, the multiple changes of view and switching main characters was whip-lashy. Felt sort of unoriginal with the first MC as an author. Was not expecting the 'paranormal'-esque element. The ending felt kind of rushed and abrupt. Fairly fast read though, there were parts that made me angry and parts that made me cringe but supposedly in line with the characters themselves.
