Review: Julia Alvarez riffs on ‘Arabian Nights’
(iStock)In One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade invites the king to listen to her stories to preserve her own life. The new wife will be beheaded in the morning unless she convinces the king to keep her alive, which she does by asking, “Do you want to hear a story?” This ninth-century premise inspires The Cemetery of Untold Stories, by the best-selling novelist Julia Alvarez.
The main character is a novelist, Alma Cruz, who uses Scheherazade as her pen name. She shares biographical overlap with Alvarez—they are both from the Dominican Republic; they have a plethora of sisters; and they are writers in the later years of their lives. While death does not lurk around the corner for Alma, as it does for Scheherazade, she recognizes that she does not have enough years left to write all the stories that she has received from the world. With more than 1,001 stories to tell and less than 1,001 years to tell them, Alma returns to her homeland in the Dominican Republic to bury the untold stories in a cemetery. But stories, as everyone knows, have a life of their own.
The book opens with Alvarez’s rewrite of Scheherazade’s command to listen: “Let’s go to Alfa Calenda.” The phrase “Alfa Calenda” refers to a made-up world that Alma’s father created with his mother to avoid the terror of living with an abusive husband and father. It is like their own “Once upon a time,” a storyland. It is also the setting of the novel itself, into which Alvarez guides readers, where so many stories from the past are interwoven with her own narrative creations.
The Bible, Arabian Nights, Dante, Shakespeare and most significantly Ovid’s Metamorphoses are tangled up with the various living and dead stories of Alvarez’s imagination. Alvarez even goes meta when a scholar enters the story wanting to write on The Influence of Canonical and Classical Texts on Latinx Literature, primarily featuring Alma Cruz.
One of the primary threads of the novel follows the life of two sisters, Perla and Filomena, whose story retells in a new way that of Ovid’s Philomela and Procne. While Alvarez’s Filomena physically keeps her tongue, unlike Ovid’s victim, Alma confesses that she is drawn to the silenced characters, “their tongues cut off.” Toward the end of the novel, Perla, who has become silenced by the violence she herself has committed, needs to read Ovid’s story again and again to find her voice.
Only by reading his story aloud does Perla reclaim her tongue. The novel plays with the dissonance between “wagging tongues,” mostly through Alma’s garrulous sisters, and silence and listening, as carried out by the nearly saintlike Filomena. It plays with the tension between telling our stories as a way to clarify what happened to us and who we are versus shutting up and discovering “that the earth itself was storying.”
Even as Alma attempts to bury the stories that will not let her go, they climb out of their graves. Alma has a seemingly magic intercom that allows only those with a story to enter: “Tell me a story.” Filomena, her neighbor, is the first to gain entry. She becomes the caretaker of the cemetery of untold stories, and thus readers’ medium for hearing the buried tales. Through Filomena as intermediary, readers hear from Alma’s father, receiving his stories and his secrets.
We also meet Bienvenida, the second wife of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic whom Alvarez reviled in her novel In the Time of the Butterflies, and whose story Alma has always desired to tell but could never get quite right. One might imagine that Alvarez herself longed to be able to write the story of Bienvenida and could not capture it, so she integrated the pieces of her attempt into this episodic novel.
Of course, Bienvenida was a real person, compelling readers to echo Alma’s sister and ask, “So it’s a true story, not like you made it up?” However, Alvarez wants to move readers “beyond these binaries” between the fictional and the true. Are the stories that we create like Ovid’s Philomela and Procne less true than the biography of Bienvenida because she was a real person? Or does Alvarez show us, by retelling Ovid’s story in the 20th century in the Dominican Republic, that the story is so true it transcends time and place more than even that of historical persons and events?
The novel is a philosophical investigation into what stories mean and why human beings tell them. The novel asks, “If you could hear other people’s stories all the time, what then? Would you understand them better?” Stories might act as methods for knowing truth more than investigations into people’s facts.
A little boy’s mother reads him stories like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to comfort him in the face of his harsh father. A woman tells herself a story about her amazing lover in order to avoid facing his deceit and cowardice. A man and a woman tell each other stories to escape their loneliness, becoming lovers as an afterthought. “Chinese curse like our fukú,” one buried story says in his reflection. He continues: “May you have an interesting life. An interesting life makes for a good story.” Stories are for comfort, for survival, for self-examination, for relationship; and at the end of all these purposes, stories seem to be, in Alvarez’s novel, our very life.
The way the buried stories talk to one another from their graves reminded me of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (though the aesthetic of that book is wildly different), but in Saunders’s novel, the ghosts deal with the afterlife and are forced to question what happens after one dies.
Although The Cemetery of Untold Stories is set in a cemetery, death is always far at the periphery. When Alma Cruz loses her friend in the opening chapter, it’s like a page torn from a book, without much grief or pathos stirred for the reader. Then her mother dies, followed shortly by her father, who is then raised from the dead through his stories in the third part of the novel. Throughout the book, death is like passing behind a curtain. Death lacks the darkness, pain and finality that often accompanies it in other literature. One wonders if Alvarez is trying too hard not to write a swan song.
In the acknowledgments, Alvarez thanks her “mostly invisible and anonymous readers, without whom all [her] stories would have ended up in Alma’s cemetery.” She offers her readers gratitude “for the resurrections you have given and continue to give my books by reading them and using them to fertilize the ground your own creations spring from.”
The Cemetery of Untold Stories is a novel made up of all the stories that Alvarez no longer wants to carry in bits and pieces in her head, so she buries them in this book, hoping her readers will be like Filomena and shake open the pages to listen to the stories talk. If you do, and if you enjoy this collection of intertwining stories, then, for Alvarez you become one more proof that we are—and need to be—story creatures.
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