Belonging somewhere or with someone, or a group of someones preferably since community is integral to the human condition, cuts to the core of what it means to be alive.
We all know those sage observances about no one being an island and it taking a village to raise someone, but it’s only when community, even if its just an immediate family, suddenly becomes absent, at it does for Isla Larsen Sanchez early on in Ann Dávila Cardinal’s luminously poetic and deeply emotional resonant novel The Storyteller’s Death, that we really realise how diminished we are being on our own.
Or more truthfully in Isla’s case, feeling like we are alone.
For even though Isla’s father has passed away and her Puerto Rican-born mother has shipped her off to her family in San Juan, cutting the eight-year-old from the only world she’s ever known in New Jersey, she is very much in the bosom of a welcoming, if emotionally dysfunctional family, most notably Alma, her great aunt who spends each and every summer giving Isla the lost of sense of belonging she so desperately yearns for.
Too young to fully appreciate what’s happened to her, all Isla sees is a family and culture she barely knows being roughly substituted for the loving family she once had, now hewn into pieces by death and her mother’s descent into alcoholism.
That night, after I finished my weekly call with Mom, Alma asked to speak with her and sent me off to bed.
That was one of the few times I’d heard Alma raise her voice.
I was proud if was on my behalf.
Isla feels like luggage that has been cast aside when her mother boards the plane back to the United States that first time, leaving her young daughter unsure of who she is, who really loves or wants her and whether she has anywhere she can truly call home.
It’s understandable that Isla feels so adrift when so much has fallen from her diminutive and barely comprehending grasp, but as time goes on and San Juan and the secretive and wealthy Sanchez family become more like home to her, Isla begins to discover that she has more in common with these people she once felt were strangers than she could ever begin to imagine.
How much they are becomes graphically clear when her abuela or grandmother dies when Isla is eighteen and she discovers that she is heir to a storytelling tradition which each of the family cuentistas or storytellers belong to, one which sees stories from the dead being replayed again and again to those who can see them until they are resolved in some way.
Of course, Isla is freaked out when this happens the first time but soon realises, despite Alma and others being unwilling to countenance that the dead can bring stories from their life into the living present, that this is what binds her to Puerto Rico, to the Sanchezes and to a long tradition to which she most definitely belongs.
It’s a hell of way to find out who your people really are but after the initial shock wears off, Isla, estranged from her mother and never really sure beyond her cousin Maria and the gardener’s sweet son José who really loves her and to whom she really matters (even Alma, loving as she is, gives Isla moments of doubt from time to time), comes to own who she is and her part in solving a decades-old mystery that cuts to the very heart of the family’s identity and the solving of which is the key to Isla’s future and that of the family of which is irrefutably a part, no matter how she might feel at times.
The enthralling beauty of The Storyteller’s Death, quite apart from its lyrical prose and beguiling propensity for delightfully descriptive language, is that it brings magical realism and the real world of pain, loss and grief together in ways that are truly encompassing and transformative.
Isla, over the course of this immersively woven story, comes to understand that she belongs to a community that is far richer, deeper, and in need of considerable healing just like her, and that while she has felt lost and along much of her life that that has never really been the case.
It beautifully explores the chasm that can develop between what is real and what is perceived and how bridging that often requires something truly dramatic to bridge it or mend it, something beyond the lived experience of anyone involved.
That’s certainly the case in The Storyteller’s Death where Isla, equipped only with the limited understanding that she was abandoned – she was in part but that’s not the whole story, not by a long way as Cardinal beautifully illuminates – and that she is not worth anything to anyone (again, a broken and barely-comprehended grasp of the situation at hand), is, on her own, not able to fully appreciate the tradition to which she belongs and the family to which she is now dearly important.
I had an image in my head of crabs and seashells exploding on an otherwise pristine beach. There were other beaches that were open to the public. I hoped to see them someday, maybe even with José. My throat tightened and I swallowed that idea down. It was such a normal wish, so typically teenage. I wanted it so much it frightened me.
In my experience, caring about something meant I was going to lose it.
It takes the dramatic intervention of her gift arising to its full potential for her to really begin to see what it means to be part of a community, a family and how even something so wonderful and precious, can be cruelled by poor choices and long-guarded secrets.
The Storyteller’s Death also explores how bigotry and prejudice slice through harmony and belonging, wrecking something with so beauty and possibility simply because someone has decided long ago that certain things or people have value and some do not.
Rich with poetic intent, an appreciation of what it means to be an outsider (until you are not) and a passionate love of storytelling that bubbles through every page of this brilliantly affecting piece of writing, The Storyteller’s Death is one of those books that reaches into your heart and asks you to think about who you are, where you belong and whether the stories you tell yourself or those told to you, are true and if they have any value or meaning.
If they do, it asks you what you would do with them, and how you would carry them forward; will you ignore them and inadvertently imperil those you love or will you act on the stories, as Isla does with the visions so real they sometimes actually injure her, and bring peace and healing where for decades there has been none?
It’s a lot to ask of anyone, and there’s much of the book were Isla doesn’t know what to do with the stories she is told or witnesses, and the mistaken beliefs that neglect of those stories engenders in her, but when she begins to own her stories, and the rich, if broken, storytelling tradition of which she’s a part, her whole world changes in ways that will gladden your heart and which celebrate on every gorgeously written page what it means to have your stories, to own them, and to share them with those you love.