Afterlife
By: Julia Alvarez / Narrated By: Alma Cuervo
Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
This could’ve been GREAT, but tooo many things got tooo rushed through
I know, I know—with author Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, I thought that she could’ve edited herself, got kinda bogged down into the itty bitty details in the histories of that book’s protagonists. I mean, the danged audiobook was 13+ long. So, yeh, I kvetched a bit.
But here with Afterlife, I’m gonna just go ahead and ask: Why on earth did you publish this NOW? Write a bit more, a LOT more, give us a story not just a gazillion and six threads. This was a pick for our little audiobook club, and it had all three of us wondering if Alvarez wasn’t just trying to rush a “different” version of the immigrant story to the US, give illegal immigrants a face and humanize them during these ooooh sooooo inCREDibly politically divided times. It’s as though she saw that she MUST say her piece, use her craft, to shine light on the issues.
And there are many issues addressed in this book. Antonia is a woman of a certain age, newly retired from her job teaching English at a college, newly widowed when her loving, and kinda activist, husband died on his way to pick her up. She’s grieving, but she’s also dealing with sudden involvement in the life of an illegal immigrant working on her MAGA neighbor’s dairy farm—he’s roped her into helping him get his girlfriend from the coyotes who helped her cross the border but who are now keeping her from him, saying he owes them more money. Plus, she’s one of four sisters and Eldest Sister Izzy is on again off again, currently is missing. Antonia’s remaining sisters are pushing for an intervention as they feel that ha-ha yes, Izzy is whimsical, but her totally erratic and grandiose and manic behavior is always followed by a devastating crash. They’re worried about her, and a private investigator is hired.
Add to this questions about just how responsible are we for our fellow man? And add to it just when does exuberance and volatility become mental illness and should we ever intervene? And you’ve got yourself one big ol’ telenovela of a novel… at only 6 1/2 hours. Estela, the girlfriend, winds up being pregnant from another dude, Izzy winds up saving a pack of llamas, the sisters howl and sneer their way through loving each other, gouging where it hurts, the town Sheriff honors the local immigrant community, citing that if cheap labor had been around when he was young, maybe the family farm could’ve been saved, and Antonia is pretty wishy washy through the whole thing—looking for quotes from authors to provide inspiration, listening to the voice of her dead husband to provide guidance and the impetus to act.
I get it: Alvarez writes in such a way that we see there is an afterlife. That tho’ dead, our loved ones live through us with the words they said during life, the way they acted, the way they lived. But seriously, everything just whooshes by in a blur, and when you look at it, tho’ Antonia is acting all put-upon, her engagement with either Estela, or with the Izzy episode, last barely a few months and she winds up with a clean plate. So not much in the way of being a heroine there, I must say.
I do get, also, that perhaps Alvarez was going for bittersweet with her ending, but the characters were so flatly written, plus one of them does such a 180 behavior-wise, that it winds up as a Happily Ever After with a neat little bow around it. And though I dearly love a HEA, I don’t respect them when a book is supposed to be tackling great issues of major import.
Alma Cuervo, doing her second Alvarez audiobook, does really well with her narration; my mom was thrilled that the Spanish wasn’t mangled. She gets each sister’s overwrought speech and mannerisms, and she manages the young in there right along with those women getting on in years. No problem with Ms. Cuervo.
No, Ms. Alvarez hasn’t had a fiction book put out in 15 years, and all I can say is I wish one could make that statement: in 16 years. Cuz really, take some more time with this book, Ms. Alvarez—develop your plot threads, and PLEASE develop your characters because they were all just coming off flat, and I wasn’t caring. Nah, this zoomed by, and I feel like I got the overview rather than a good and involved story dealing with crises going on today.
Can’t say I recommend this cuz it’s half a story for a full credit; you’re not going to wish for your six hours back—you’re just gonna wish it was more. And that’s never a good thing…
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