Author julia alvarez11/9/2023 “I thought, my North American reader often is not interested in the history south of the border, but if I create a kind of bridge character to bring that reader along, maybe I can get that reader inside that world.” I actually thought the fact that she was … in a different economic situation from a typical refugee was interesting because it might draw in readers who would normally be completely disconnected.”Īlvarez compares it to “In the Time of the Butterflies,” in which there’s a “very American” character. “I felt physically like I was inside this woman’s body as she tried to protect her child. “But here I wanted to use a sensibility where you strip more and more away until what remains becomes more charged.” “My tendency has been, for so long, to write these very big stories,” she says. Renowned for meaty, polyphonic fictions like “ How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” and “ In the Time of the Butterflies,” Alvarez wanted to write “a short, lyrical novel” because she’s always admired the form. “She’s aware of the diversity within herself and the complicated feelings that people around her have about it, even people she chooses to admire.” “Antonia is trying not to be trapped, trying not to have to choose to go down into a certain bunker of ethnicity and identity,” says Alvarez. That certainly describes the protagonist of her new novel, “Afterlife.” Antonia Vega is, like her creator, an immigrant to the United States from the Dominican Republic and, also like Alvarez, a retired professor of literature. Fluidity is part of what you learn and do as a writer. “The way I feel is, I’ve always been a hybrid. “There are so many bigger things,” Alvarez says, speaking by telephone from her home in “the tropical Champlain Valley” of Vermont, where she and her husband, Bill Eichner, live on 11 acres that he farms. Ask the novelist Julia Alvarez whether to address her as “HOO-lee-uh” or “JEWEL-yuh” she’ll tell you she doesn’t care.
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