The Spark of a Footnote: On Reading Saving the World

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world.
Allen Ginsburg

Dominican history, family, and personal experiences are the rich grounds that Julia Alvarez expertly mines to unearth fictional gems.

In How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and ¡Yo!, her imagination taps the well of family and personal memories to delight readers with the frequently funny and often heartrending stories of the making of a writer. In the Time of the Butterflies and In the Name of Salomé bring back to life the tales of the Mirabal sisters and the Henríquez Ureña clan—well-known personages in Alvarez’s homeland, the Dominican Republic. In retrieving these stories from the Spanish-speaking world, and then retelling them in English, Alvarez makes the lives of these noted Dominicans accessible to American readers.

In her fifth novel for adults, Saving the World, Julia Alvarez finds the spark of inspiration in a footnote she came across while conducting research in preparation for writing In the Name of Salomé: the story of a Spanish expedition charged by King Carlos IV with the mission of eradicating smallpox from the face of the earth.

In the novel, as counterpoint to the tale based on the true story of Isabel Sendales y Gómez—the governess who watched over the twenty-two orphan boys selected as live carriers for the vaccine—Alvarez offers a fictional heroine: Alma Huebner, a Latina writer who is immersed in telling Isabel’s story, with the usual fears and trepidations a writer encounters at the onset of producing a novel.

In Saving the World, Alvarez, who’s has proven herself to be an expert at weaving together stories of disparate times and people, links events of the early nineteenth century with those of the early twenty-first—both centered on devastating diseases: smallpox and AIDS—to provide her readers with a glimpse of the sacrifices people are capable of making when they give over their lives to a noble cause.

Isabel’s story is intriguing. As an adolescent, smallpox disfigured her face. As a result, in spite of her passionate nature, she believes that she’s condemned to live a lonely life, thinking that no man will ever be interested in her. Because of this, when the opportunity to participate in the vaccination campaign arrives at the doorstep of the orphanage she directs, even though Isabel knows that the expedition will likely take her from her homeland forever, she sees it as an opportunity providence has provided to strike back at the disease that took her family and altered her life forever. The details of her quest to help save the world—particularly her relationship with Dr. Francisco Xavier Balmis, the charming yet megalomaniac director of the vaccination expedition—are alluring, holding the reader’s interest throughout.

On the other hand—and it pains me to say this for not only am I a devoted student of Alvarez’s work, but also a BIG fan—the story of Alma Huebner pales in comparison (at least at first reading; however, I’ve often changed my mind after rereading a novel, so check back with me later). Alma’s plights—writer’s block, depression, a beloved elderly neighbor dying of cancer, a husband caught in a life-threatening situation—although in outline form have the markings of a page-turner, when fleshed out, the details fall flat, perhaps because there’s too much crammed into the short span of this character’s life. What’s more—and it’s surprising considering Alvarez’s penchant for portraying life in Latin America truthfully—the story of what happens to Alma’s husband while he is working in the Dominican Republic strains one’s willingness to believe the narrative (at least in the eyes of someone, like me, who lives in Latin America), and I fear, in fact, that the account of what happened to him may serve to reinforce negative stereotypes many Americans have of “Banana Republics.” All in all, Saving the World doesn’t tug at my reader’s heart in the same life-changing way that Alvarez’s previous works have done.

For once, the stories Julia Alvarez chooses to tell in contraposition to one another don’t match up well; and her fifth novel, although well-intentioned in its desire to help readers reclaim their awareness of the world, may end up as a footnote in what has so far been, in the career of this gifted Dominican-American author, a remarkable string of literary gems.