Salome
Julia Alvarez, Plume, 2001
Reviewed by Linda Carlson, October 2008
What if you had grown up hearing tales of your incredibly gifted and wildly-popular poet mother, who died when you were only three? To further complicate matters, what if you had had to flee your country as a preteen because of one of many regime changes, so you had grown up without a mother AND without a country?
The reader is invited to pull up a chair and try to follow the life of Camila Salome Henriquez de Urena, a life our heroine considers dull compared to her famous mother’s. I say “try” because in the telling, the author jumps back and forth from generation to generation and from the Dominican Republic to Cuba to Haiti to the US, and back again. I actually had to re-read the first half of the book when I was completely finished, for fear I had missed something important early on, before I had learned this important truth: Alvarez writes in the first person as both Camila and her mother!
That said, by writing in the first person, Alvarez manages to convey to us the depths of despair and heights of rapture, interspersed with confusion, betrayal, tenderness, humor, and boredom that our heroine and her mother experience throughout their lives, all against the backdrop of revolutions, counter-revolutions, assassinations, and forced exile. It’s the History Channel meets Lifetime! And it’s mostly true, although names have been changed to protect the dead.
I suppose a grasp of Caribbean history, as well as a rudimentary understanding of Spanish, would’ve increased my pleasure in reading this book, but I’m not sure by how much. Once I began re-reading, I went ahead and re-read the whole thing, and enjoyed it immensely. The mother-daughter-country-family-love themes are universal, and need no translation. I think. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go look up “quejas” in my online Spanish-English dictionary.