How people of color carry the burden of untold stories

Book Review The Cemetery of Untold Stories By Julia Alvarez Algonquin Books: 256 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Julia Alvarez’s warm and graceful latest title, “The Cemetery of Untold Stories,” her seventh adult work of fiction, circles around writers and stories that don’t make it to the books readers hold in their hands, however spectacular they may be. The author Elizabeth McCracken astutely wrote in “The Hero of This Book” that “an unpublished book is an ungrounded wire.” In Alvarez’s opening pages, she uncovers an added burden of trying to publish the stories and histories of people of color, and the writerly despair of feeling those stories are lost forever upon death. But when Alma refuses and tells the mentor it’s her job to write it, her mentor says bitterly, “I guess you haven’t heard the news that none of us is getting out of here alive.” But as her mentor’s star falls, Alma’s own successes build around her pen name, Scheherazade, after “One Thousand and One Nights.” Alma concludes that it was “that novel she could neither write nor put aside” that killed the mentor. Brava, the artist friend of Alma who sculpts statues and markers for the cemetery, offers a foil to Alma’s perspective that publishing is essential and that if a story is not written and published “it’ll die with its teller.” To support her counterclaim to that, Brava points to the tales Alma received from her mother and grandmother, which were “beloved on a cellular level, long before Alma ever wrote them down.” A dream cloud of inset homespun oral tales forms, and these charming narratives whose connection is initially uncertain produce an impassioned telenovela about love, betrayal and the Dominican women who survive and find happiness despite patriarchy.