Review of In the Name of Salomé
A book written by Julia Alvarez
A. Book Information
Alvarez, Julia. 2000. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. ISBN 1-56512-276-3.
B. Plot Summary
In the Name of Salomé is a work of historical fiction based on the great poet and pedagogist, Salome Urena de Henriquez. The novel alternates between the life of Salome in the chaotic Dominican Republic and her daughter, Camila in America and later Cuba. The book revolves around the central theme and following questions: “Who are we as a people? What is a patria? How do we serve? - - and most importantly - - Is love stronger than anything else in the world?” This novel is a journey through the lives of two women tragically separated by death yet bonded by a spiritual connection that transcends mortality. The reader is transported into their innermost worlds as the women retreat into their own thoughts and feelings of love and questioned existence.
C. Critical Analysis
Julia Alvarez has done her homework in creating this provoking novel. Alvarez had the help of authentic diaries, historians, professors of the same universities in which Camila taught and several editions of Salome’s poems. Much like the character and historical figure, Camila, Alvarez herself resides in both the Dominican Republic and the United States, undoubtedly pouring her own experiences of a split existence into this novel.
The pride and machismo of a Dominican father (who was also President for four months) is expertly portrayed, and is balanced by the sullen, heartbroken Salome in Alvarez’s book. Pancho, the father, after leaving to Paris for medical school, takes up with a Parisian mistress and fathers an illegitimate child. This is not the only affair he is rumored to have had. Upon finding out, Salome is heartbroken, and upon returning from Paris she orders Pancho to a separate bedroom, “From now on, you go your way, and I go mine.” (Alvarez, p256).
The Spanish language is effortlessly woven in this novel, even some titles of chapters are written in Spanish and even have the Spanish number word, for example chapter seis is, “Ruinas.” Many of the characters in this novel have authentic, endearing pet names such as Papancho for Pancho, Pibin for Pedro, and Camilita.
The setting takes place in various locations, including the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and the US. For the American reader, the descriptions of the Dominican Republic and Cuba are palpable. As the family embarks on a journey via ship, the reader can picture the scene, “They are on deck and up ahead loom dark green mountains with a little town at their feet and pretty houses coming right up to the sea with zinc roofs flashing in the sun and fishing boats bobbing up and down, just like when they lived in Puerta Plata, which she remembers as the sound of their mother coughing.” (Alvarez, p326)
D. Review Excerpts
Amazon.com
It's 1960, and 65-year-old Camila Ureña decides to join the New World. Castro's new world, that is, which she has been following on the news with a heated excitement she hasn't felt for years. Forced into early retirement from her 20-year post as a Spanish teacher among the perky white girls of Vassar College, Camila faces a choice: whether to move to Florida and live down the block from her best friend or to fly over Florida and into Havana where her brothers live--and thereby land in a place of upheaval and hungry ghosts. The hungriest ghost of all is Camila's mother, Salomé Ureña, whose poems became inspirational anthems for a short-lived revolution in the late-19th-century Dominican Republic.
Based in fact, In the Name of Salomé alternates between Camila's story and her mother's. Camila's chapters are written in the third person, Salomé's in the first. By calling Camila "she," Alvarez alienates her within the text--as if in her attic at Vassar she is floating outside herself in an America that does not belong to her. In contrast, Salomé's chapters vibrate with life and tears and melodrama. Through the alternating voices, which Alvarez handles masterfully, the reader comes to grasp Camila's longing for the color and music of her mother's lost world--how the meek daughter wishes "she" could become the "I" of her mother's revolutionary and passionate life as a poet, which began under a pseudonym, Herminia, in a local political paper:
Each time there was a new poem by Herminia in the paper, Mamá would close the front shutters of the house and read it in a whisper to the rest of us. She was delighted with the brave Herminia. I felt guilty keeping this secret from her, but I knew if I told her, all her joy would turn to worry.
Yet for Salomé, her pseudonym allows her to become the voice of a country, "and with every link she cracked open for la patria, she was also setting me free." --Emily White --
From Publishers Weekly
The Dominican Republic's most famous poet and her daughter, a professor in the United States, are the remarkable protagonists of this lyrical work, one of the most moving political novels of the past half century. Camila Henr!quez Ure$a is introduced as an "eminent Hispanicist, a woman with two doctorates [and] a tenured chair" at Vassar. She is also the exiled daughter of both renowned Dominican poet Salom Ure$a and the country's last democratically elected president. Born in 1850, Salom called a revolution into being with her fearless poetry. Even as an adolescent, she saw her pseudonymous poems inspire bloodshed in the streets. Camila, born in 1894, followed the fortunes of her famous family into exile, first in Cuba, then on her own in the U.S., where she became an academic's academic. Alvarez, who has written more than once about women in exile (How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents) and women revolutionaries (In the Time of the Butterflies), and who is herself a poet, academic and exile, has found in Salom and Camila Ure$a her best topic yet. The novel's protagonists are based on real characters, yet by offering history through the lenses of both the poet and the scholar, as well as by portraying male-dominated events from the perspective of female activists, Alvarez conveys purely Latin American revolutionary idealism with an intellectual sensuality that eschews magical realism. The narrative flows freely across timeDHavana in 1935; Minnesota in 1918; Washington, D.C., in 1923; Santa Domingo in the mid to late 19th century; Poughkeepsie in the 1950sDand is punctuated with letters and poetry. While Salom is the flame that heats this cauldron, Camila tends the fire.When she retires from teaching in 1960, she must choose a meaningful conclusion to her life. Her long-time love, Marion, though recently married, invites her to live nearby in Florida. But born and bred to revolution, Camila has been too long away from the fray. It is not giving away anything to say that she spends the next 13 years in Cuba, heeding the old call to create "Jos Mart!'s America Now." $50,000 ad/promo; 22-city author tour. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc
Reviews accessed at:
http://www.amazon.com/Name-Salome-Julia-Alvarez/dp/0452282438/ref=pd_bbs_sr_9/104-6408436-7567945?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183327862&sr=8-9
E. Connections
Other books for young people by Julia Alvarez.
· Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the USA. ISBN 0670038733
· In the Time of the Butterflies. ISBN 0452274427
· How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. ISBN 0452287073
Before We Were Free. ISBN 044023784X
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