In a world full of enchantment, where does mystery begin? The two authors pose this question in a new novel released this spring.
IN Mourning pages by Mexican magical realist interrogator Diego Gerard Morrison, the main character is a Mexican writer named Aureliano Más II, who struggles with memories of family pain and – you guessed it – magical realism. And the main character Alma Cruz in Julia Alvarez’s latest novel, The cemetery of untold stories, also a writer. Alma seeks to bury her unpublished stories in a graveyard of her own making, to find peace in their rest – and meaning from the vulnerability that comes from unpublished stories. ever heard.
Both of these novels, one by an emerging writer and the other by an established author, take the open road to remembering love, pain, and fate. Both find their destiny not in death but in the reality of abandonment and in dreams born of the hope of reunion. At this intersection of memory and meaning, their storytelling differs.
Mourning pages
pages of mourning, released this month, is set in 2017, three years after 43 students disappeared from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College after being kidnapped in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. The main character, Aureliano, is attempting to write the Great Mexican Novel reflecting this crisis and the unexplained disappearance of his mother when he was a boy. He was also struggling with the idea of magical realism as a literary genre – he resented being named after the main character in 100 Years of Solitude, fits inside it. He sets out on a journey with his maternal aunt to find his father, ask questions about his mother, and deal with drinking problems and various earthquakes.
Morrison’s voice reflects work as a writer, editor and translator based in Mexico City, who seeks to interrogate “the concept of dissonance” through integrative art forms such as poetry and fiction, translation and criticism. His story can be seen as an archetype, a criticism or a reflection through the linguistic rhythms of Pan-American literature. His novels’ names are dropped and allusions to American, Mexican and Latin American writers include Walt Whitman, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel Garcia Márquez – and even himself. There is a serious use of adjectives to accompany the vivid dissonance of his characters.
Genre-wise, there’s nothing magical about Morrison’s story. There are no magical rivers, enchanting messages, children born with tails. Morrison’s dissonance is real – people disappear, they suffer from addiction, writer’s block, crazy parents, crazier magicians, blank pages, corruption, loss of loved ones. In this depiction of real life in Pan-America – because of all this we are obviously also suffering in the North – Morrison has found his magic. His Aureliano is our Aureliano. He is someone we know. Perhaps someone we love – someone who is trying their best to live.
Cemetery of untold stories
From the author of In the time of butterflies And How the García girls lost their voices, Cemetery of untold stories is the seventh novel by Julia Alvarez. It is a story that is both languid and urgent in conjuring a world of magical happenings. At the origin of these developments, in a cemetery in the Dominican Republic, is the confrontation between memory and the living agenda. Alvarez is a renowned storyteller and teacher, a writer of poetry, nonfiction, and children’s books, was honored in 2013 with the National Medal of Arts. She continues her dazzling virtuosity with the story of Alma Cruz.
Alma, central writer of Cemetery of untold stories, has one goal – not to go crazy over the delayed promise of the boxes of unpublished stories she has stored away. When she inherits land in her homeland – the Dominican Republic – she decides to retire there and designs a cemetery to bury her manuscript manuscripts, along with characters whose fictional lives require reciprocation is not reciprocated. Her sisters thought she was crazy and a waste of their inheritance. Filomena, a local woman hired by Alma to look after the cemetery, finds solace in her steady salary and unusual workplace.
Alma wants peace for herself and her characters. But they have their own agendas and once buried, they begin to reveal them: They talk to each other and to Filomena, rewriting and modifying Alma’s creativity to reclaim their own .
In this new story, Alvarez creates a world where everyone strives to achieve their dreams – retirement, literary fame, steady work, peace of mind, authenticity. Things get complicated during the rewrite, when ambitions and memories collide with the reality of no money, capture, no imagination, jealousy and the grace of modest competence. Alma’s sisters, Filomena, the townspeople – all confirm Alma’s wish to find a final resting place for her memory. Alvarez sprinkles their journey with snippets of dialogue and phrases in Spanish and a – “no hay mal que por bien no venga” (there’s good in every pain) – emerges as a talisman in her stories. There’s always something magical to discover in a story, and that’s especially true where Alvarez’s landing.
Marcela Davison Avilés is an independent writer and producer living in Northern California.
