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Julia alvarez something to declare12/12/2023 ![]() ![]() Third, the writer is so conscious of her Dominican American identity that her perceptions lose their innocence, so caught up are they in cliches of multicultural self-definition. Even the fact that many Dominicans and Haitians "disappeared" during Trujillo's repressive 31-year regime appears as a newsy footnote in an otherwise happy childhood. The Dominican Republic, and the people in it, become a "lost Eden" that Alvarez somehow can't translate into real characters, conflicts and events. Members of her extended family - the aunts and the uncles and cousins - appear as an unindividuated force of goodwill. The second problem is the lens of nostalgia Alvarez casts on the Dominican Republic, which she left when she was 10. These repetitions almost made me put the book down. Rafael Trujillo's dictatorship, that Julia's father was a doctor, that her grandfather was the cultural attache to the United Nations and took her to the opera, and that she went to boarding school in the States, we are unfortunately bound to hear the same things over and over again in subsequent essays - as many as six times. If on we learn that the Alvarez family left the Dominican Republic because of Gen. First of all, most of these essays have been previously published in journals, magazines and anthologies as a collection, they are highly repetitious, a function of not having been properly edited as a whole. The book is irritating for a number of reasons. They are, in short, the equivalent of 24 photographs of the author. The 24 autobiographical essays in Julia Alvarez's "Something to Declare" can roughly be grouped into two categories: those under the label "Customs" that are about growing up in the Dominican Republic and the United States as a "hyphenated" American and, under "Declarations," those about being a writer. $20.95 By Zia Jaffrey, author of "The Invisibles: A Tale of the Eunuchs of India" SOMETHING TO DECLARE By Julia Alvarez Algonquin. ![]()
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