#Julia alvarez libros full

Only the work of certain painters seemed to accompany me. Whimsical ones:Īs well as ardent, profound questions: Where is the child I was?Īs with the written word, so also with visual art. One of the poets who accompanied me during this time was Pablo Neruda, particularly his last book, published posthumously, The Book of Questions, poems made up entirely of questions. What do I do now? Where do I find the people I've lost, the qualities they embodied, the energy they brought into the world? How do I not let who they were die out completely? Question after question, and if anyone tried to answer them, I felt even more isolated and sunk in my grief. But all I could manage were the simplest childlike questions. I wish I could report profound philosophical insights in response to these texts.

Poems with gravitas, with the grave in sight, the stone briefly rolled away from the mouth of the poet. Eliot's Four Quartets David Ferry's Bewilderment. I must have read every translation of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving work of literature Homeric Hymn to Demeter I read and reread Rilke's 'Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes,' T.S. Only poetry-certain poetry-(and short poetic novels) seemed to reach me, the older and more traveled down the generations the better. Oh spare them, spare them! Life was hard enough.

#Julia alvarez libros full

Novels suddenly seemed overwhelming, full of noise, words, characters put through so many needless complications. In this state, I didn't have the patience to read. All we can do is wait and see what is left when our grief is done with us-if it ever totally is. Part of us dies with the death of people we love. Life, or the desire for it, was leaving me. I felt as if I'd been sliced open, and my guts poured out of me. But then came a loss I was not expecting: my older sister committed suicide. Their loss, though painful, was in the natural order of things. No matter how old you get, while your parents are living, you are still somebody's 'child.' Each time I returned to the Dominican Republic to look after their care and visit with them, I'd braced myself for the day when they wouldn't know who I was. Actually, I had been losing both incrementally to Alzheimer's over several years. My parents joined that clan exodus, dying within five months of each other. A whole flank of familia is suddenly gone. One of the difficult things about coming from a culture where your extended familia is considered your 'nuclear' family is that you don't just lose a set of parents, a couple of aunts and uncles, but dozens upon dozens of tías, tíos, madrinas, padrinos, abuelitas, abuelitos. Some books you will yourself to write, some have their own wills and come through you, insisting on being written.Ī few years ago, I began losing many of the people I love. Julia Alvarez on How Her New Children's Book Came to Be