The Gated Community of the Imagination: A Guest Post from Julia Alvarez
Julia Alvarez’s novels have stunned us for years (Afterlife, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of Butterflies) and her newest is no exception. Julia has joined us to write all about her new book and the inspiration behind it, in her exclusive essay below.
Hardcover
$25.20
$28.00
The Cemetery of Untold Stories
The Cemetery of Untold Stories
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$25.20
$28.00
A funny, life-affirming novel about storytelling, friendship and death from the author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.
A funny, life-affirming novel about storytelling, friendship and death from the author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.
As I enter the late chapters of my life, I want to understand this new landscape of growing old, especially growing old in a craft I’ve dedicated my lifetime to practicing.
The Cemetery of Untold Stories is the story of an older writer, Alma, who has run out of stories and creative stamina. It’s time to put her writing life to rest. When she inherits a piece of abandoned land in a poor barrio next to the town dump in her homeland of the Dominican Republic, she decides to create a cemetery for all her failed manuscripts, her rough drafts, her never fully realized characters and lay them to rest there.
But her characters refuse to be laid to rest. (Like a popular sign at protest rallies for immigrant rights: “They tried to bury us, they did not know we were seeds,” Alma’s buried manuscripts would say: She tried to silence us, she did not know we were stories!) Her characters begin telling their secret lives they withheld from her. As they do, the surrounding barrio comes alive with its own stories, bringing forth the question of whose stories get to be told and celebrated. Why do some stories end up colonizing/dominating the landscape of literature leaving no room for other stories, alternate stories, to rise up and be told?
The Canadian critic, Constance Rocke, recently coined the term Vollendungsroman for this type of novel, which serves as the bookend to the Bildungsroman, the novel about growing up, coming of age. Vollendungsroman is the novel of growing old, and now especially welcomed that we are living longer and that our boomer readership is hungry to explore this new stage of our lives. Rocke notes that many new novels are addressing this ageism in fiction whereby elders are no longer relegated to the background.
So you can think of The Cemetery of Untold Stories as a Vollendungsroman, with the added twist that it takes on old age in portrait of the artist as an old(er) woman, not a man, and with the added complication of a transnational bicultural narrator whose stories, many of them, came from somewhere else.
In Parul Sehgal’s unsettling essay, “The Tyranny of the Tale,” in The New Yorker (July 10, 2023) she ruminates on storytelling. Sehgal writes about the pervasive uses and misuses of narrative, describing Scheherazade as “the hardest working woman in literature.” (Scheherazade, by the way, is Alma’s pen name!) We are a storytelling animal, Sehgal notes. It’s how we think, how we make meaning. But she also strikes a cautionary note: “How inconspicuously narrative winds around us, soft as fog. How efficiently it enables us to forget to look up and ask: What is it that story does not allow us to see?”
I invite my readers to enter the novel as visitors to Alma’s Cemetery of Untold Stories and experience and delight in this world of stories as well as consider its limits, what we are not seeing within the gated community of the imagination.