73 pages • 2 hours read
Julia AlvarezThe Cemetery of Untold Stories
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Let’s go to Alfa Calenda”
Content Warning: Both the source text and this guide contain descriptions of racism, the sexual assault of a child, child loss, death by suicide, and anti-gay bias.
Alma Cruz, a writer from the Dominican Republic, has a writer-friend who is obsessed with a particular story that she wants to write. This friend is an otherwise successful writer, but her struggle with this untold story overshadows that acclaim in her own eyes. In pursuit of inspiration, the writer-friend travels the world, hoping to pick up the thread of the story. The writer-friend also helps to promote Alma’s writing, and Alma eventually becomes successful. However, Alma’s mother accuses her of spreading lies about the family and stops talking to her. The writer-friend suggests that Alma use the pseudonym of Scheherazade to tell her stories freely.
At a conference, Alma overhears another writer describe her writer-friend as “a piece of work” (6). During one particular meeting, the friend makes Alma swear that if something should happen to her, Alma will finish the friend’s unwritten story about a central character named Clio. Alma is not comfortable with this idea. As time passes, Alma gets tenure as a professor and buys a small house. She also distances herself from her friend, whose intensity she finds unsettling. One day, her friend calls and tells her that she is in a psychiatric hospital and needs Alma’s help to get out. Alma refuses gently, saying that perhaps if she gets well, her long-sought story will come; she also suggests that her friend will not recover until she writes her story. When Alma again refuses to help, her friend hangs up on her.
For months, Alma tries to contact her friend, feeling guilty for ignoring the signs of her friends deteriorating mental health over the years. After several years, she learns that the friend has died of a heart attack. Alma believes that the unwritten story has killed her friend and vows not to let the same thing happen to her. As the years pass, Alma writes more novels and attends more funerals. After Alma’s mother dies, her sister Amparo takes care of their father, Dr. Manuel Cruz, but she is not good with money, so the three sisters who live in the United States agree to take on his care. Because he has dementia, they decide to move him to a senior facility in Vermont. He agrees to go when they tell him that they are taking him to Alfa Calenda, a fantasy place that he invented with his mother when he was a child. Manuel starts having trouble recalling his daughters’ names, and he sometimes mentions the name Tatica but refuses to explain who she is, even when Alma tries calling him by his childhood nickname of Babinchi. Alma’s sisters—Piedad, Consuelo, and Amparo—each have a different theory about who Tatica is. Meanwhile, Alma’s father tells stories of Babinchi living under two dictators in the Dominican Republic. (One of these “dictators” is his father, and the other is Trujillo.) Manuel tells stories of Babinchi joining a revolution and then going to New York and Canada before continuing his medical education. However, when Alma asks her father if he is Babinchi, he just smiles. He dies in his sleep, leaving Alma with many unanswered questions.
After her father’s death, Alma struggles with her writing. One night, her writer-friend appears in her dream and warns her to let go of the unwritten stories that torture her. Her friend tells her to burn or bury the stories, and when Alma awakes, she decides to let go of the past and her guilt about her friend. She packs all her story drafts into boxes, retires from the college, and decides to move back to the Dominican Republic and end her writing career. Her incomplete manuscripts include a story titled Bienvenida, which is Spanish for “welcome” but in this case refers to a real-life woman who was the wife of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, a brutal Dominican dictator also known as El Jefe. Alma also summarizes the other unfinished stories, including one about an elderly man who was a torturer in the Trujillo dictatorship, another about a Wisconsin woman who gets visitations from the Virgin Mary, and another about the 1937 Parsley Massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic. Alma feels guilty about abandoning these stories.
The figure of Bienvenida is a particular obsession for Alma because her father claimed to have known the woman somewhat. In the past, Alma researched Bienvenida’s hometown, Monte Cristi, and learned that Bienvenida married Trujillo but had several miscarriages. After eight years of marriage, Trujillo divorced her to marry a mistress, and Bienvenida’s name disappeared even from history books. Alma once visited the cemetery where Bienvenida was buried in an unmarked grave. From her father, Alma learned that her grandfather owned property outside of Monte Cristi and started a second family on the Haitian side of the border. Alma always wanted to know more about this second family and about her father’s early life.
Now, Martillo, the Cruz family lawyer, contacts the four sisters regarding their inheritance of several parcels of land scattered around the DR. To divide the lots fairly, the sisters decide to toss a coin on an online app, and Alma claims the largest and least valuable plot of land. Later, she tells her sister Consuelo about her dreams in which she is told to bury her stories, but she does not reveal her plans to live on the parcel herself. Upon examining her weed-filled property, Alma decides enlists the help of an artist friend named Brava and explains her plan to bury her stories. Brava suggests creating artistic markers to serve as tombstones for the characters. Alma hires builders to construct her own casita (small house) on the property and informs her sisters of her decision to move back to the DR. They protest, but Alma points out that both of their parents had dementia, a disease with possible genetic factors, and if she should also develop dementia, she would be more comfortable in the DR, where it is cheaper to live. Alma does not mention that she is planning to live on the unappealing lot. Alma calls her agent and officially closes out her writing career, ignoring his protests.
Part 1 Analysis
This first part of the book consists of a single chapter that is designed to introduce most of the main characters simultaneously and hint at the novel’s dominant themes, and to this end, Alma’s experiences with storytelling immediately touch upon Stories as a Force of Destruction. Alma tells her writer-friend when the latter is in a psychiatric institution: “We both know […] that we don’t get free until we write our stories down. […] If you bring forth what is inside you, what is inside you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is inside, what is inside you will destroy you” (9). This exchange reveals the novel’s central premise: the fact that Alma is also haunted by untold stories, especially those of her father (Manuel) and Bienvenida. This theme is further emphasized when her now-deceased writer-friend appears to her in a dream and urges her to let go of those stories. Alma’s plan to build a house and a story-cemetery on the inherited plot of land thus reflects her all-consuming fear that she may suffer a similar fate as her friend if she does not reduce the power that these untold stories have over her. By turning to art and ritual and literally burying her stories in a cemetery, Alma creates a physical sign of her psychological separation from the stories that trouble her. The rest of the novel illustrates her success—or lack thereof—and the consequences of such a momentous yet nebulous undertaking.
Alma’s lingering fears over the dangers of leaving stories untold are further complicated by the issue of whose stories she is entitled to tell. This problem motivates Alma’s refusal when her writer-friend begs her to tell the story of Clio, the main character of the unwritten novel that has haunted her for years. Alma’s refusal ultimately stems from a feeling of misappropriation, for she admits, “[I]t’s not for one person to tell another’s story” (8). However, in the very same line, the broader narration ironically remarks that “Alma hadn’t been doing this left and right in her own writing” (8). Thus, Alma’s hypocrisy is designed to draw a fine distinction; although she refuses to write about Clio because the character is not her own invention, she has nonetheless written the stories of her family members and their homeland as if she has every right to do so. The problematic nature of this contradiction becomes apparent when Almas’s mother is outraged by the stories, calling them lies and claiming that Alma is “defaming the family name” by telling stories of the darker aspects of the family’s history (6). However, even in the midst of using different characters to portray both sides of this issue, Alvarez offers no definitive answers, leaving it to her readers to decide for themselves.
Alvarez also uses this section of the novel to touch upon the idea that authors often alter the telling of a story for the benefit of different readers. For example, Alma’s writer-friend deflects a question about her difficult dialogue by declaring that she is “not writing for white people” (4). This statement highlights the literary movement in which authors endeavor to depict the authentic lives and vocabularies of their own cultures rather than pandering to a mainstream, white, Anglo-American audience. Significantly, Alvarez also puts that concept into practice in her own work, and The Cemetery of Untold Stories employs many words and phrases of Dominican Spanish without translating them. At one point, Alma herself stops to consider her intended audience and her reasons for writing. As the narrative states, “Perhaps Mami [Alma’s mother] had been right: Alma’s ‘betrayals’—usurping stories from her familia and homeland to serve as savories for the First World’s delectation—would come back to haunt her” (16). Throughout the novel, Alma and several other characters straddle Dominican culture and that of el norte, as the United States is often called, and they, too, must consider their audience when presenting themselves, just as every author does upon penning a story.
As these multicultural concerns become more prominent in the narrative, Alvarez introduces key concepts and motifs to reflect the shifting philosophical ideas that drive the broader plot. Even in the midst of her own personal crisis, it is clear that navigating the cultural differences between the US and the DR is a very important issue for Alma. These concerns are also tempered by the importance of familia, and the omnipresence of sisters and mothers in this first chapter foreshadows the overarching importance of the family structure and the interwoven nature of the characters’ life stories. Within this framework, the specter of incipient dementia and its deleterious effects on both the patients and their family combine to form a recurring motif, for the emphasis upon sharing untold stories is juxtaposed with the inevitability of forgetting that such stories ever existed.
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