Dueling Divas.

• Author: Martinez, Elizabeth Coonrod
• Position: Saving the World - Book review

Saving the World, by Julia Alvarez. New York: Algonquin, 2006.

After publishing four books in nine years--launching her to fame and making Julia Alvarez the quintessential Dominican writer--a period of six years ensued before Alvarez would provide readers with another tantalizing novel. In the meantime, however, she had published children's books, collections of poetry, and other nonfiction works. Last spring, Alvarez embarked on a twenty-four-stop tour to stump for her new book, Saving the World. This 368-page work of fiction features two heroines, depicted in alternating chapters (eight each), one embarking on a historic journey in the early nineteenth century, the other questioning her role in life and that of others in her late twentieth-century society.

While doing research for her previous novel, In the Name of Salome, based on a prominent Dominican poet of the nineteenth century, Alvarez says she discovered a brief account about a human scientific experiment in 1803 that sought to eradicate smallpox by carrying a vaccine around the world. It was successful, and innovative, as it required live carriers, which were orphan children. This factual tidbit impressed Alvarez and remained in her subconscious, instigating new research and her creation of a novel from it. The pioneering doctor, a Spaniard named Francisco Balmis, vaccinated twenty-two young orphan boys with cowpox, transported them across the Atlantic Ocean to Mexico, and then utilized new orphans to carry the vaccine again across the Pacific to the Philippines. The director of the orphanage, Isabel Sendales y Gomez, served as the children's caretaker; half of Alvarez's novel is told from her point of view. Both the doctor and the orphanage director are real-life historical figures. The contemporary character in the alternate story, Alma, is a novelist suffering from writer's block. Alvarez may have been--like Alma--attempting to create a "family saga," while the early research kept popping into her mind and surged as its own story.

Saving the World might have turned out differently had the September 11th tragedy not occurred. During her book tour Alvarez related that when "9/11 happened, it made me think about what I was doing and why." She reasons that storytellers make an impact on society as well as wrongdoers. Instead of the single historical account she was developing, she decided to add a contemporary story. The result is a novel that depicts stark differences between Old...