Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.” My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. “Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight.
#Summary of life after life novel cracked
The novella ends with Antonia learning the Japanese repair technique kintsugi (in which repairs to cracked pottery are not concealed but rather highlighted with gold) and thus Alvarez delivers a final message: In periods of loss and emptiness there is often something better – a person, an opportunity, a perspective – waiting to disrupt that space, and to give a new life after death.Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: And as the master storyteller, Alvarez collects these broken fragments of Antonia’s life to form a whole. In the end, all of this emotional mayhem yields a positive effect.
Having studied and taught stories and poems all her own life, it’s now in her DNA, to want to give that life a shapely form.” The earth doesn’t need one more resentful, depressed sort. “Just because she doesn’t yet know doesn’t mean she should close down and settle for the joyless default. “What lies beyond the narrow path, the nibble, the sip, where the dragons be?” Antonia wonders. In the midst of these upheavals, Antonia finds her resolve to forge ahead. But her involvement unwittingly sets off a chain of events that ties her in even more tightly.īy signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy.Īlready a subscriber? Log in to hide ads. She is an immigrant herself, after all she came to the United States as a child with her family from the Dominican Republic, and she knows she is one of the few in her rural community who can help Mario navigate language barriers. And yet a reluctant empathy stirs her from her grief. The retired college professor, who once collected ideas for stories in a shoebox in her office, really doesn’t want to get involved with this scenario. He wants her help in bringing his girlfriend – stuck in the powerful clutches of smugglers in Colorado – safely to Vermont. At home, Antonia finds that now she instead of Sam must be the one to answer the problems knocking at her front door – like Mario, one of the undocumented Mexican workers who milks the cows at the farm next door. Her three sisters think a reunion in Illinois to celebrate her upcoming birthday is just what she needs.
If not for herself, then for the others: her three sisters, a few old aunties, nieces and nephews.”īut the chaos of life has a way of interrupting periods of mourning, and this is no different for Antonia. “Countless times a day, and night, she pulls herself back from this edge. “Late afternoons as the day wanes, in bed in the middle of the night, in spite of her efforts, she finds herself at the outer edge where, in the old maps, the world drops off, and beyond is terra incognita, sea serpents, the Leviathan – HERE THERE BE DRAGONS,” writes Alvarez.
The home that Antonia and Sam built together no longer feels like a place of comfort, but instead an unsteady boat on an uncertain sea of loss. Sam’s untimely death (this is no spoiler the opening pages deliver this news) charts Antonia a course she’d really rather not take. Julia Alvarez’s newest novel “Afterlife” explores what happens when the golden years suddenly dim into something unexpected. But everything changes one day when her husband Sam never shows up to a celebratory dinner. This was to be the case for Antonia Vega, a recently retired college professor and writer living in Vermont. Retirement is supposed to be a time filled with family, trips, and hobbies – a finale to a long and satisfying career.