Alvarez, Julia
9780063316645, 0063316641
Paperback
Literary icon Julia Alvarez, bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies, shares an inventive and emotional novel about storytelling and her homeland—the Dominican Republic—that Kirkus Reviews calls a "rich and moving saga" and Shelf Awareness calls "a lyrical thought-provoking meditation on truth, complicated family narratives, and the question of whose stories get told."
Untold is the story of a writer as she reaches the end of her career and her life. Alma Cruz doesn’t want to end up like a fellow author and mentor whose cautionary tale she tells, one who fought so long and hard with a novel she couldn’t complete that it threatened her sanity.
After the death of Alma's elderly parents, she and her sisters each inherit small plots of land in the Dominican Republic. Alma chooses the biggest one, which none of the others want because of its supposedly undesirable location and its state of dishevelment. She has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories, the manuscripts and pages, drafts, revisions—the characters and lives she worked on, sometimes for years, but could never get quite right. To let them rest in peace.
But some of them have other ideas.
Alma needs help with her plan, so Brava, an artist friend who "gets it" (unlike Alma’s perplexed sisters), jumps on board—the cemetery becomes a sculpture garden, Brava's work the custom markers for each plot. Filomena, a local and one of the few who gains entry to the cemetery by telling her own stories to an intercom that opens the gate, is soon the caretaker, and her story and the story of her sister Perla become central to the narrative. This is a novel in which stories develop tentacles that entwine other stories, insinuating themselves one to the other, and making new stories in the process. The circumstances of Filomena’s own life make her the sympathetic ear Alma’s stories still need as they unspool their immutable yearning to be told, to find their meaning, to reach endings.
