The Cemetery of Untold Stories

February 26, 2024
The uplifting latest from Alvarez (Afterlife) follows a 60-something author as she contends with the relationship between fiction and reality. After Alma Cruz’s friend and fellow author dies unexpectedly, she’s convinced the cause of death was the compulsion to write. That interpretation provokes Alma, who publishes under the pseudonym Scheherazade, to consider her own “many characters abandoned mid-narrative” in unfinished manuscripts and what would become of them if left unwritten. She also reflects on memories of her father’s descriptions of an imaginary place called Alfa Calenda, which he invented as a boy to escape from his volatile father. After Alma inherits a rundown portion of her dad’s estate, she has a dream that Scheherazade, who appears to her as an alter ego, wants her to “bury my abandoned drafts.” She responds by building a cemetery for her manuscripts on the property and hiring a kind, middle-aged local woman named Filomena as groundskeeper. Various characters emerge from the buried manuscripts’ pages and begin talking to their creator, including Bienvenida, whom Alma modeled after the wife of a Dominican dictator, and who sheds light on the fate of Filomena’s long-lost nephew and his incarcerated mother. Throughout, Alvarez seamlessly melds magical realism with heartfelt character portraits. This brims with the intoxicating power of storytelling. Agent: Stuart Bernstein, Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists.