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Namų tvarkytojos vadovas
Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) rašė puikiai, bet nepastoviai, jos kūrybinis laikotarpis – septintasis–dešimtasis dešimtmečiai. Visa jos kūryba įkvėpta vaikystės, praleistos Vakarų Amerikos kalnakasybos miesteliuose, glamūriškos paauglystės Santjage, Čilėje, trijų nenusisekusių santuokų, kone visą gyvenimą trukusios kovos su alkoholizmu, vėlesnio gyvenimo etapo Berklyje, Naujajame Meksike ir Meksiko mieste bei įvairiausių smulkių darbų, kuriuos dirbdama rašytoja išlaikė save ir keturis vaikus. Dešimtojo dešimtmečio pradžioje L. Berlin tvirtai laikėsi blaivybės ir rašė pastoviau. Tuo metu gavo „svečio rašytojo" pareigas Kolorado universitete, o netrukus tapo dėstytoja. 2001 m. sušlubavus sveikatai rašytoja persikėlė gyventi pas artimuosius Pietų Kalifornijoje. Mirė 2004 m. Marinoj del Rei.
L. Berlin laikoma visų „stiprių moterų rašytojų", tokių kaip Jennifer Egan ar Rachel Kushner, krikštamotė. L. Berlin per daug gerai žino gausybę tamsiausių gyvenimo užkaborių, kad ką nors vyniotų į vatą. Dėl to jos sunkiai užsitarnautas, bet išskirtinis tonas ir vizija tik įrodo: dėl tokių istorijų verta daug ką išgyventi.
Novelių rinkinys „Namų tvarkytojos vadovas“ įtvirtina Lucią Berlin kaip puikią ir išskirtinę rašytoją, vertą plačiosios auditorijos dėmesio.
„Šis iškalbingas novelių rinkinys atskleidžia Lucia Berlin kaip nepakartojamą gyvenimo stebėtoją ir kritikę didžiule širdimi – autorė ypač simpatizuoja protingoms ir žodžio kišenėje neieškančioms moterims, kurių nelepina gyvenimas. L. Berlin pasakojimai kupini jausmingumo ir nepagražintos kalbos – jie tarsi istorijos, kuriomis dalinasi moteris ir vyras iš Tomo Waitso dainos, susitikę gūdžią lietingą naktį." - The New York Times Book Review.
„Šie tekstai pasakojami išskirtiniu, neįprastu ir prieš tai negirdėtu Amerikoje tonu." - Vogue.
L. Berlin laikoma visų „stiprių moterų rašytojų", tokių kaip Jennifer Egan ar Rachel Kushner, krikštamotė. L. Berlin per daug gerai žino gausybę tamsiausių gyvenimo užkaborių, kad ką nors vyniotų į vatą. Dėl to jos sunkiai užsitarnautas, bet išskirtinis tonas ir vizija tik įrodo: dėl tokių istorijų verta daug ką išgyventi.
Novelių rinkinys „Namų tvarkytojos vadovas“ įtvirtina Lucią Berlin kaip puikią ir išskirtinę rašytoją, vertą plačiosios auditorijos dėmesio.
„Šis iškalbingas novelių rinkinys atskleidžia Lucia Berlin kaip nepakartojamą gyvenimo stebėtoją ir kritikę didžiule širdimi – autorė ypač simpatizuoja protingoms ir žodžio kišenėje neieškančioms moterims, kurių nelepina gyvenimas. L. Berlin pasakojimai kupini jausmingumo ir nepagražintos kalbos – jie tarsi istorijos, kuriomis dalinasi moteris ir vyras iš Tomo Waitso dainos, susitikę gūdžią lietingą naktį." - The New York Times Book Review.
„Šie tekstai pasakojami išskirtiniu, neįprastu ir prieš tai negirdėtu Amerikoje tonu." - Vogue.
485 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2015
About the author
Lucia Berlin
33 books889 followersBerlin began publishing relatively late in life, under the encouragement and sometimes tutelage of poet Ed Dorn. Her first small collection, Angels Laundromat was published in 1981, but her published stories were written as early as 1960. Several of her stories appeared in magazines such as The Atlantic and Saul Bellow’s little magazine The Noble Savage.
Berlin published six collections of short stories, but most of her work can be found in three later volumes from Black Sparrow Books: Homesick: New and Selected Stories, So Long: Stories 1987-92 and Where I Live Now: Stories 1993-98.
Berlin was never a bestseller, but was widely influential within the literary community. She aspired to Chekhov's objectivity and refusal to judge. She has also been widely compared to Raymond Carver and Richard Yates. One of her most memorable achievements was the stunning one-page story "My Jockey," which captured a world, a moment and a panoramic movement in five quick paragraphs. It won the Jack London Short Prize for 1985. Berlin also won an American Book Award in 1991 for Homesick, and was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Berlin published six collections of short stories, but most of her work can be found in three later volumes from Black Sparrow Books: Homesick: New and Selected Stories, So Long: Stories 1987-92 and Where I Live Now: Stories 1993-98.
Berlin was never a bestseller, but was widely influential within the literary community. She aspired to Chekhov's objectivity and refusal to judge. She has also been widely compared to Raymond Carver and Richard Yates. One of her most memorable achievements was the stunning one-page story "My Jockey," which captured a world, a moment and a panoramic movement in five quick paragraphs. It won the Jack London Short Prize for 1985. Berlin also won an American Book Award in 1991 for Homesick, and was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 4,423 reviews
August 2, 2015
My foundation as a writer was shaped by these stories. I first read most of them in 1984, when I went to grad school in writing at U of Colorado in Boulder. Lucia was one of several wonderful profs I had there, but it was her stories alone that I read, with awe, and said, "THAT is what I want to do!"
Quiet awe, by the way. That's the beauty of these stories. No kings or dukes or ladies in waiting losing their heads or fighting for the crown. No grand sweeping anything, no boisterous narrator, showing off. But no boring MFA stories full of pretty sentences about nothing, either. Just raw, gripping tales about switchboard operators, cleaning ladies and shy little Protestant girls trying to fit in in Catholic school.
They are immediately engaging, with that voice, that draws you in with its candor as well as its insight. Lucia had an extraordinary ability to gaze right inside of people, sort of an emotional x-ray vision, with the people in her lives and her characters. (Of course those are the same--or the latter came from the former. She had that uncanny ability in life, and spilled it seemingly effortlessly onto the page.)
Fifteen years later, when I published Columbine, you can witness my attempt to emulate Lucia on every page. I hope I was worthy. I keep reading her, trying to get closer to the Lucia ideal, though I never will. My favorite story is "My Jockey," and I've read it probably 100 times. If I can do what she did there, once, ever, that will be enough.
(I was lucky enough to read this book in galleys. It's coming out Aug. 18.)
Quiet awe, by the way. That's the beauty of these stories. No kings or dukes or ladies in waiting losing their heads or fighting for the crown. No grand sweeping anything, no boisterous narrator, showing off. But no boring MFA stories full of pretty sentences about nothing, either. Just raw, gripping tales about switchboard operators, cleaning ladies and shy little Protestant girls trying to fit in in Catholic school.
They are immediately engaging, with that voice, that draws you in with its candor as well as its insight. Lucia had an extraordinary ability to gaze right inside of people, sort of an emotional x-ray vision, with the people in her lives and her characters. (Of course those are the same--or the latter came from the former. She had that uncanny ability in life, and spilled it seemingly effortlessly onto the page.)
Fifteen years later, when I published Columbine, you can witness my attempt to emulate Lucia on every page. I hope I was worthy. I keep reading her, trying to get closer to the Lucia ideal, though I never will. My favorite story is "My Jockey," and I've read it probably 100 times. If I can do what she did there, once, ever, that will be enough.
(I was lucky enough to read this book in galleys. It's coming out Aug. 18.)
![Profile Image for Orsodimondo [in pausa].](https://cdn.statically.io/img/i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1528452721i/10490224._UY200_CR39,0,200,200_.jpg)
July 28, 2024
LA DONNA CHE CADDE SULLA TERRA
La vita o la si vive o la si scrive, diceva Pirandello.
Lucia Berlin invece l’ha vissuta e scritta, prima vissuta e poi raccontata, ma anche contemporaneamente.
Non è stata certo l’unica ad abbinare vita e arte, ma a lei sembra riuscito particolarmente bene, il connubio è pressoché perfetto.
Pensai: voglio un uomo che per salutare suo padre lo bacia.
[Irresistibile] Lucia Berlin a 29 anni.
C’è un’ironia particolare nelle parole della Berlin, che taglia tutto e niente, tutti e nessuno: chi scrive, chi racconta, non ne rimane incontaminato, protetto.
Un’ironia che fa venire in mente le infermiere, la loro indifferenza come arma contro la malattia: combattila, sconfiggila, ignorala, se vuoi.
E se al posto della malattia si mette la vita, mi è facile riconoscere questa particolare ironia.
Un’ironia che però non eleva mai chi racconta, e chi scrive, sopra il soggetto raccontato, non lo rende giudicante, ma sempre empatico, partecipe, vicino, coinvolto.
Grazie, gli sussurrai, e grazie a Dio, forse…
Berlin scrive come se avesse fretta, come sembra aver vissuto, da un posto all’altro, da un lavoro all’altro, da un amore all’altro, da una storia all’altra: i suoi racconti saltano avanti e indietro, qui e là, due parole e un nuovo fatto, un’altra storia è aggiunta, senza perdersi in lungaggini, senza sprecare parole, evitando anche i verbi se non sono indispensabili (Il profumo delle rose e la muffa del suo maglione, scrive in ‘Buoni e cattivi’, senza aggiungere altro, solo quello che serve).
Non è soltanto che questi racconti sono quasi tutti corti (dieci pagine di media): è la quantità di cose e fatti e ricordi e spunti e vita che contengono e racchiudono.
Max telefona e dice ciao. Io gli dico che mia sorella sta per morire. E tu come stai? Chiede lui.
Lucia Berlin mi fa pensare a Marilyn Monroe: la stessa ansia e capacità di vivere e bruciare.
Un’ansia che è sete di vita. Come se qualcosa non bastasse mai.
Sarebbe, però, una Monroe con pochi film all’attivo, perché Lucia non ha scritto molto, e sarebbe una Marilyn perfino più bella.
Così bella, uno sguardo che attraversa, così limpido da far male, che mi fa pensare a quell’altra creatura che ci ha deliziato dal grande schermo solamente per una manciata di film, imprimendosi indelebile nella memoria (la mia sicuramente), prima di scegliere la carriera di principessa.
Il panorama dalla finestra del salotto di amici. Non per niente la strada si chiama Grand View.
Pagine affollate di giovani studentesse, suore cattoliche, infermiere, donne delle pulizie, tossici, alcolisti, randagi, donne con più matrimoni alle spalle, storie ambientate in collegi scolastici, lavanderie a gettone, ospedali, centri di disintossicazione, studi medici, in Alaska, in Idaho, Montana, Arizona, Cile, New Mexico, in Messico, California, Colorado.
L’isola di Alcatraz, con l’ex penitenziario, vista dall’alto di Russian Hill.
Tutte le cose che lei è stata, i lavori che ha fatto, i posti dove ha vissuto.
Sono narrazioni comprese in brandelli di conversazione, capaci di cogliere l’attimo nel senso più letterale del termine.
Capaci di cogliere l’ironia anche dove sembra assente.
Capaci di affrontare argomenti insoliti, strani, per esempio come succede che possano essere divertenti i funerali.
Talvolta gli stessi personaggi ritornano, come se Berlin avesse progettato una sorta di romanzo: soprattutto due sorelle, con la prima malata terminale di cancro, Sally e Dolores le si incontra spesso.
Il ristorante Chez Panisse al 1517 di Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, citato. Molti di questi racconti sono ambientati, tutti o in parte, nella Bay Area, soprattutto a Oakland e Berkeley. Shattuck Avenue è una delle strade principali di Berkeley, e Chez Panisse è probabilmente il ristorante francese più celebre di tutti gli Stati Uniti.
Poi finalmente t’imbatti in un racconto lungo, quello più lungo, ben trentasette pagine, a Lucia sarà girata la testa scrivendolo, così lungo le sarà sembrata una quaresima: e ci sono cambi di io narrante - finora ti ha abituato a voci di donne, adesso all’improvviso c’è anche un uomo, più spesso la voce narrante è maschile, e ti senti gradevolmente spiazzato – la storia è più rotonda dettagliata e strutturata del solito, c’è un caso giudiziario, un processo, ma sia l’uno che l’altro si risolvono in poche righe, tutti il racconto è sui personaggi, quello che fanno, e quello che sentono – e arrivi al finale, per la prima volta molto cinematografico, al punto che cominci a immaginarti il dolly che si alza lento e i due personaggi che si allontanano diventando piccoli, e ti rendi conto che questo è l’attimo che Lucia voleva cogliere, e cercava, lo ha inseguito per tutte le trentasette pagine, ed era qui che voleva arrivare, a Jesse e Carlotta, che Jesse chiama Maggie, scendono dalla macchina di John, una Porsche decapottabile, lei è stata assolta, i due si allontanano sotto la pioggia. Si chiama ‘Fammi un sorriso’, e il sorriso Lucia me lo ha proprio strappato.
Spesso nominata, la fermata del Greyhound di Oakland. Greyhound è la compagnia di autobus più famosa degli US, porta praticamente ovunque (e ferma più che ovunque, i viaggi sono lunghi).
Iniziò a scrivere poco dopo i vent’anni, alcuni suoi racconti uscirono su riviste, ma la prima raccolta fu pubblicata nel 1981, quando aveva ormai 45 anni. La definirono “one of America's best kept secrets” perché è morta poco nota, nonostante un National Book Award vinto nel 1991, il riconoscimento vero, il successo, se tale si può definire, è arrivato postumo.
La Vida in New Mexico dove è ambientato il bellissimo racconto ‘Randagi’.
Carver le è prossimo, non solo per stile e temi, ma anche per percorso esistenziale: il nomadismo, la trafila dei numerosi lavori manuali, l’insegnamento di scrittura creativa (Berlin anche nella prigione della Contea di San Francisco).
È morta a Marina del Rey (accanto a Los Angeles) il giorno del suo sessantottesimo compleanno con un libro in mano.
Pucón in Cile, con il lago davanti, dove è ambientato ‘La vie en rose’.
Bridget Read nel numero di agosto 2015 della rivista Lit Hub sottolinea come lo sguardo da estranea della Berlin è perfetto per affrontare una forma di racconto prettamente americana: l’uso stupefacente di colloquialismi e tic linguistici per creare subito personaggi che rimangono impressi, l’abilità nel trasformare luoghi qualunque come una lavanderia a gettoni e scene ordinarie di turismo balneare, con pochissima azione, in interi ecosistemi di personalità e di umanità, rafforzano l’idea che la prospettiva di una scrittrice donna sia la più adatta ad analizzare un paese di contraddizioni, un posto in cui capire chi viene ripulito e chi si occupa della ripulitura è vitale.
Quest’ultimo concetto fa riferimento al doppio significato che può assumere il titolo originale della raccolta, anche titolo di uno dei racconti, A Manual for Cleaning Women, letteralmente “Manuale per donne delle pulizie”: ma, se ‘cleaning’ diventa il verbo e ‘women’ l’oggetto, potrebbe essere interpretato nel senso di ‘Manuale per pulire le donne’.
La donna che scriveva racconti.
La vita o la si vive o la si scrive, diceva Pirandello.
Lucia Berlin invece l’ha vissuta e scritta, prima vissuta e poi raccontata, ma anche contemporaneamente.
Non è stata certo l’unica ad abbinare vita e arte, ma a lei sembra riuscito particolarmente bene, il connubio è pressoché perfetto.
Pensai: voglio un uomo che per salutare suo padre lo bacia.
[Irresistibile] Lucia Berlin a 29 anni.
C’è un’ironia particolare nelle parole della Berlin, che taglia tutto e niente, tutti e nessuno: chi scrive, chi racconta, non ne rimane incontaminato, protetto.
Un’ironia che fa venire in mente le infermiere, la loro indifferenza come arma contro la malattia: combattila, sconfiggila, ignorala, se vuoi.
E se al posto della malattia si mette la vita, mi è facile riconoscere questa particolare ironia.
Un’ironia che però non eleva mai chi racconta, e chi scrive, sopra il soggetto raccontato, non lo rende giudicante, ma sempre empatico, partecipe, vicino, coinvolto.
Grazie, gli sussurrai, e grazie a Dio, forse…
Berlin scrive come se avesse fretta, come sembra aver vissuto, da un posto all’altro, da un lavoro all’altro, da un amore all’altro, da una storia all’altra: i suoi racconti saltano avanti e indietro, qui e là, due parole e un nuovo fatto, un’altra storia è aggiunta, senza perdersi in lungaggini, senza sprecare parole, evitando anche i verbi se non sono indispensabili (Il profumo delle rose e la muffa del suo maglione, scrive in ‘Buoni e cattivi’, senza aggiungere altro, solo quello che serve).
Non è soltanto che questi racconti sono quasi tutti corti (dieci pagine di media): è la quantità di cose e fatti e ricordi e spunti e vita che contengono e racchiudono.
Max telefona e dice ciao. Io gli dico che mia sorella sta per morire. E tu come stai? Chiede lui.
Lucia Berlin mi fa pensare a Marilyn Monroe: la stessa ansia e capacità di vivere e bruciare.
Un’ansia che è sete di vita. Come se qualcosa non bastasse mai.
Sarebbe, però, una Monroe con pochi film all’attivo, perché Lucia non ha scritto molto, e sarebbe una Marilyn perfino più bella.
Così bella, uno sguardo che attraversa, così limpido da far male, che mi fa pensare a quell’altra creatura che ci ha deliziato dal grande schermo solamente per una manciata di film, imprimendosi indelebile nella memoria (la mia sicuramente), prima di scegliere la carriera di principessa.
Il panorama dalla finestra del salotto di amici. Non per niente la strada si chiama Grand View.
Pagine affollate di giovani studentesse, suore cattoliche, infermiere, donne delle pulizie, tossici, alcolisti, randagi, donne con più matrimoni alle spalle, storie ambientate in collegi scolastici, lavanderie a gettone, ospedali, centri di disintossicazione, studi medici, in Alaska, in Idaho, Montana, Arizona, Cile, New Mexico, in Messico, California, Colorado.
L’isola di Alcatraz, con l’ex penitenziario, vista dall’alto di Russian Hill.
Tutte le cose che lei è stata, i lavori che ha fatto, i posti dove ha vissuto.
Sono narrazioni comprese in brandelli di conversazione, capaci di cogliere l’attimo nel senso più letterale del termine.
Capaci di cogliere l’ironia anche dove sembra assente.
Capaci di affrontare argomenti insoliti, strani, per esempio come succede che possano essere divertenti i funerali.
Talvolta gli stessi personaggi ritornano, come se Berlin avesse progettato una sorta di romanzo: soprattutto due sorelle, con la prima malata terminale di cancro, Sally e Dolores le si incontra spesso.
Il ristorante Chez Panisse al 1517 di Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, citato. Molti di questi racconti sono ambientati, tutti o in parte, nella Bay Area, soprattutto a Oakland e Berkeley. Shattuck Avenue è una delle strade principali di Berkeley, e Chez Panisse è probabilmente il ristorante francese più celebre di tutti gli Stati Uniti.
Poi finalmente t’imbatti in un racconto lungo, quello più lungo, ben trentasette pagine, a Lucia sarà girata la testa scrivendolo, così lungo le sarà sembrata una quaresima: e ci sono cambi di io narrante - finora ti ha abituato a voci di donne, adesso all’improvviso c’è anche un uomo, più spesso la voce narrante è maschile, e ti senti gradevolmente spiazzato – la storia è più rotonda dettagliata e strutturata del solito, c’è un caso giudiziario, un processo, ma sia l’uno che l’altro si risolvono in poche righe, tutti il racconto è sui personaggi, quello che fanno, e quello che sentono – e arrivi al finale, per la prima volta molto cinematografico, al punto che cominci a immaginarti il dolly che si alza lento e i due personaggi che si allontanano diventando piccoli, e ti rendi conto che questo è l’attimo che Lucia voleva cogliere, e cercava, lo ha inseguito per tutte le trentasette pagine, ed era qui che voleva arrivare, a Jesse e Carlotta, che Jesse chiama Maggie, scendono dalla macchina di John, una Porsche decapottabile, lei è stata assolta, i due si allontanano sotto la pioggia. Si chiama ‘Fammi un sorriso’, e il sorriso Lucia me lo ha proprio strappato.
Spesso nominata, la fermata del Greyhound di Oakland. Greyhound è la compagnia di autobus più famosa degli US, porta praticamente ovunque (e ferma più che ovunque, i viaggi sono lunghi).
Iniziò a scrivere poco dopo i vent’anni, alcuni suoi racconti uscirono su riviste, ma la prima raccolta fu pubblicata nel 1981, quando aveva ormai 45 anni. La definirono “one of America's best kept secrets” perché è morta poco nota, nonostante un National Book Award vinto nel 1991, il riconoscimento vero, il successo, se tale si può definire, è arrivato postumo.
La Vida in New Mexico dove è ambientato il bellissimo racconto ‘Randagi’.
Carver le è prossimo, non solo per stile e temi, ma anche per percorso esistenziale: il nomadismo, la trafila dei numerosi lavori manuali, l’insegnamento di scrittura creativa (Berlin anche nella prigione della Contea di San Francisco).
È morta a Marina del Rey (accanto a Los Angeles) il giorno del suo sessantottesimo compleanno con un libro in mano.
Pucón in Cile, con il lago davanti, dove è ambientato ‘La vie en rose’.
Bridget Read nel numero di agosto 2015 della rivista Lit Hub sottolinea come lo sguardo da estranea della Berlin è perfetto per affrontare una forma di racconto prettamente americana: l’uso stupefacente di colloquialismi e tic linguistici per creare subito personaggi che rimangono impressi, l’abilità nel trasformare luoghi qualunque come una lavanderia a gettoni e scene ordinarie di turismo balneare, con pochissima azione, in interi ecosistemi di personalità e di umanità, rafforzano l’idea che la prospettiva di una scrittrice donna sia la più adatta ad analizzare un paese di contraddizioni, un posto in cui capire chi viene ripulito e chi si occupa della ripulitura è vitale.
Quest’ultimo concetto fa riferimento al doppio significato che può assumere il titolo originale della raccolta, anche titolo di uno dei racconti, A Manual for Cleaning Women, letteralmente “Manuale per donne delle pulizie”: ma, se ‘cleaning’ diventa il verbo e ‘women’ l’oggetto, potrebbe essere interpretato nel senso di ‘Manuale per pulire le donne’.
La donna che scriveva racconti.
January 21, 2022
my becoming-a-genius project, part 16...maybe? (and one of my favorites of the year! find my list: https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.co...)
if you've had the misfortune of digitally encountering me before, you probably know what that means: i pick up the collected works (almost no entries have actually met this parameter) of various Respected Authors (a category that apparently depends on my mood) and read a story a day (except most saturdays, or when i'm slumping, or when i forget, or when i read more than one like the teacher's pet suckup i am) until i become a genius (which is funny because it will never happen).
anyway, this triumphantly fails to meet all guidelines. this is a selection of lucia berlin's stories, berlin is a recent entrant into the canon if she's there at all, i already accidentally read the first 17 stories, and i am dumber than ever.
so i'm not sure this can count as a genius project even if i'm being nice to myself. but i just remembered i make the rules so. f*ck it.
the past projects:
PROJECT 1: THE COMPLETE STORIES BY FLANNERY O'CONNOR
PROJECT 2: HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES BY CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
PROJECT 3: 18 BEST STORIES BY EDGAR ALLAN POE
PROJECT 4: THE LOTTERY AND OTHER STORIES BY SHIRLEY JACKSON
PROJECT 5: HOW LONG 'TIL BLACK FUTURE MONTH? BY N.K. JEMISIN
PROJECT 6: THE SHORT STORIES OF OSCAR WILDE BY OSCAR WILDE
PROJECT 7: THE BLUE FAIRY BOOK BY ANDREW LANG
PROJECT 8: GRAND UNION: STORIES BY ZADIE SMITH
PROJECT 9: THE BEST OF ROALD DAHL BY ROALD DAHL
PROJECT 10: LOVE AND FREINDSHIP BY JANE AUSTEN
PROJECT 11: HOMESICK FOR ANOTHER WORLD BY OTTESSA MOSHFEGH
PROJECT 12: BAD FEMINIST BY ROXANE GAY
PROJECT 12.5: DIFFICULT WOMEN BY ROXANE GAY
PROJECT 13: THE SHORT NOVELS OF JOHN STEINBECK
PROJECT 14: FIRST PERSON SINGULAR BY HARUKI MURAKAMI
PROJECT 15: THE ORIGINAL FOLK AND FAIRY TALES OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM
PROJECT 16: A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN BY LUCIA BERLIN
STORY 1: ANGEL'S LAUNDROMAT
sheesh. you can immediately tell lucia berlin was That Bitch.
i kept rereading paragraphs but it could have either been due to lack of focus on my part or because i really wanted them to sink in, like when you replay your favorite song because you weren't appreciating it enough.
let's err on the side of positivity for once.
rating: 3.5
STORY 2: DR. H.A. MOYNIHAN
this made me dearly miss my grandpa, who - while not a maniacal and disturbing dentist indulging in raging alcoholism - was a kind of ornery old guy with a penchant for jack daniels.
or maybe it was just that phoebe bridgers' cover of summer's end came on shuffle while i was reading this.
either/or.
rating: 4
STORY 3: STARS AND SAINTS
i have spent, as i write these little notes in my little notebook that i will later transfer to my little goodreads, most of the past 48 hours in public. as someone with untreated (but diagnosed!) anxiety that is rapidly devolving into agoraphobia, that means i have spent most of the same period believing myself so horrifically awkward it warrants execution.
this made me feel better.
rating: 4
STORY 4: A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN
i always expect a lot from title stories.
here, i was right to.
rating: 5
STORY 5: MY JOCKEY
a one pager. bold.
update: i later learned this was one of the only stories lucia berlin wrote to be recognized in her lifetime, so i feel stupid for not liking it as much as some of the others...but i don't. so.
speaking my truth.
rating: 3.75
STORY 6: EL TIM
i hated reading this but that was maybe the point?
this felt like ottessa moshfegh, and surrounded by the other stories in this collection it made me like ottessa moshfegh less.
rating: none
STORY 7: POINT OF VIEW
i just fell in love.
i'm in love with this story.
it'll be an autumn wedding and you're all invited.
rating: 5
STORY 8: HER FIRST DETOX
i'm like 1/8 of the way through this collection and already dreading finishing it.
rating: 5
STORY 9: PHANTOM PAIN
it do be like that. that's all i can say.
rating: 4.5
STORY 10: TIGER BITES
all of these stories are:
- excellent
- semi-autobiographical
- in an endlessly confusing way.
rating: 4.5
STORY 11: EMERGENCY ROOM NOTEBOOK, 1977
very grateful for a year to ground me. i have no f*cking idea when most of these take place.
rating: 3.5
STORY 12: TEMPS PERDU
too gross for me. i'm sensitive.
rating: 3
STORY 13: CARPE DIEM
i am getting some anxiety rep with devastating accuracy here.
rating: 4.5
STORY 14: TODA LUNA, TODO ANO
well f*ck. this was nice.
this book is giving me so precisely what i need that it feels like a prescription.
i read this on a plane fleeing the same goddamn place the protagonist of this story is fleeing.
rating: 4.5
STORY 15: GOOD AND BAD
i love when i feel kind of meh about a story and then i come back here to write that and see the title i noted down earlier and go "OH! well that changes things."
rating: 3.5
STORY 16: MELINA
this one is kind of basic and silly, but with the same stunning writing, and it made me remember the others are truly brilliant.
rating: 3
STORY 17: FRIENDS
like the last one, but improving from the cliché and trite.
rating: 4
STORY 18: UNMANAGEABLE
addiction is very scary.
the least hot take of all time, but this story knocked the sense out of me.
rating: 4
STORY 19: ELECTRIC CAR, EL PASO
allow me to reflect on what the hell this one means.
rating: none
STORY 20: SEX APPEAL
in a shocking twist, it turns out the men of hollywood have ALWAYS used their power and charisma to be f*cking disgusting.
rating: 3.75
STORY 21: TEENAGE PUNK
i am such a d*ck. here i am adoring this book for like 18 consecutive stories and then have two i like but don't love and nearly pitch a fit.
thanks for winning me over anyway, lucia.
rating: 4.5
STORY 22: STEP
good song. one of vampire weekend's best.
lucia berlin published three volumes of stories in her time, none of which garnered much attention, and then this little number was published a decade after her death and near-inexplicably sold more than all three of them combined in a matter of weeks.
this may include most of the stories in those three, but i don't care. this is good enough that i'm tracking down all of them.
rating: 4.5
STORY 23: STRAYS
it's a metaphor, see. you put the double meaning right in the title but you don't give it the power till the ending.
rating: 4.5
STORY 24: GRIEF
well now i am just petrified of having my relationship with my sisters turn out like this.
more importantly, people just don't go on holiday like they used to. that's something i've learned from this project.
rating: 4
STORY 25: BLUEBONNETS
people are scary. in multitudinous ways for countless reasons.
men especially.
rating: 3.5
STORY 26: LA VIE EN ROSE
a few days ago, i was fleeing a place i hate and had run out of reading material just before my flight. the universe smiled upon me because there was an outpost of one of my favorite indie bookstores in the terminal (and when is there ever anything but hudson news anymore), and then full on grinned because there was exactly one copy of this book left - which had been on my to-read list since i saw it in the non-airport location of said bookstore.
so i grabbed it, spent the remaining time before my flight walking around, boarded, sat in my seat, hit shuffle on my spotify (in which i only have, like, 2 playlists named variations of "songs i like" with hundreds of entries), and thought my thoughts.
for some reason, i was turning the phrase "la vie en rose" around in my head, thinking of lucy dacus's cover of that song, wondering if it was still in my playlist because i hadn't heard it in a while, when boom - the song ends, the next song plays, and it's "la vie en rose." out of hundreds. right at the moment i considered it.
i was so stunned i wanted to take my earbuds out and tell someone, but i am not that person, so i did a :o face to myself and picked this book up. skimmed the table of contents, which i don't usually do but for occasions with short stories.
and then - no f*cking way. a story, midway down the list's second page: "la vie en rose."
life is quite fantastic, from time to time.
this is pretty wonderful too.
rating: 4.5
STORY 27: MACADAM
little and lovely.
rating: 4
STORY 28: DEAR CONCHI
even lucia berlin's love stories are so realistic it hurts my feelings. reading this story at the same time as a rom-com felt like a moment to moment reality check.
rating: 4
STORY 29: FOOL TO CRY
lucia has so many self-insert names for herself. lou, lu, carlotta, dolores...but at the same time there's like 5 stories about each one. are they the same character? are they not? am i supposed to put two and two together or would that make seven? ARGH.
anyway, any protagonist who says things like "I decided to use the word dear instead of expensive from now on" and answers the question what do you find boring with "Nothing, actually. I've never been bored" is a special favorite to me.
AND a great last line? lucia, you spoil me.
rating: 5
STORY 30: MOURNING
reminds me of that sally rooney quote: “If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.”
but this is prettier and subtler.
rating: 5
STORY 31: PANTEON DE DOLORES
these stories are so good i want to mansplain them. the reversal of the traditional definitions of "lonely" versus "alone"...
rating: 5
STORY 32: SO LONG
i paused this story halfway to buy every lucia berlin book i could find.
rating: 5
STORY 33: A LOVE AFFAIR
i can't keep adoring multiple characters per story like this. i'm a hater. i'm not built to hold so much in my heart.
rating: 5
STORY 34: LET ME SEE YOU SMILE
so it turns out a story about an adult sleeping with a minor is never going to work for me. not if the genders are reversed, not if it's written by sally rooney, not if it's written by lucia berlin. f*cking grossos.
i will say it's funny how lucia wrote a self-insert character and then had every other character compliment her at length.
rating: 2.5
STORY 35: MAMA
killer of an ending.
rating: 4.5
STORY 36: CARMEN
carmen, from the latin, name of the roman goddess of childbirth.
god f*cking damn, lucia.
rating: 5
STORY 37: SILENCE
these perfect stories oh my god. i feel like i'm going insane. too much five star content at once, it's hurting my brain functioning, i'm destroyed, i'm melting, it's the wicked witch of the west without the flying monkeys over here.
rating: 5
STORY 38: MIJITO
the empathy here. i can't even review these beyond exclamations anymore.
rating: 5
STORY 39: 502
another new name for lucia's fictional versions of herself: lucille. far out.
rating: 4
STORY 40: HERE IT IS SATURDAY
oh god. this time lucia wrote a character that is herself so that every other character can compliment her, but this time it's a freedom writers / finding forrester / white savior goes to school situation. the character's last name is even six letters beginning BE.
thanks for making it a slight bit easier to say bye, lu.
great ending, though.
rating: 3
STORY 41: B.F. AND ME
silly and little and nice.
rating: 4
STORY 42: WAIT A MINUTE
this was so beautiful and real that i spent the whole story trying to keep it at a distance. i knew if it clicked into place for me it would be too, too much.
f*ck. it still was anyway.
rating: 5 but more if i could
STORY 43: HOMING
the last one. i'm sorry for what i said about you making it easier to say bye, lucia. i didn't mean it.
oh, no. of course this one would be extraordinary.
i want to cry.
rating: 5 and still more if i could
OVERALL
this book knocked me out. i don't know what to tell you. never in my life has a collection of stories done anything like this to me.
i'll be thinking about this forever, in a million different ways.
rating: 5
if you've had the misfortune of digitally encountering me before, you probably know what that means: i pick up the collected works (almost no entries have actually met this parameter) of various Respected Authors (a category that apparently depends on my mood) and read a story a day (except most saturdays, or when i'm slumping, or when i forget, or when i read more than one like the teacher's pet suckup i am) until i become a genius (which is funny because it will never happen).
anyway, this triumphantly fails to meet all guidelines. this is a selection of lucia berlin's stories, berlin is a recent entrant into the canon if she's there at all, i already accidentally read the first 17 stories, and i am dumber than ever.
so i'm not sure this can count as a genius project even if i'm being nice to myself. but i just remembered i make the rules so. f*ck it.
the past projects:
PROJECT 1: THE COMPLETE STORIES BY FLANNERY O'CONNOR
PROJECT 2: HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES BY CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
PROJECT 3: 18 BEST STORIES BY EDGAR ALLAN POE
PROJECT 4: THE LOTTERY AND OTHER STORIES BY SHIRLEY JACKSON
PROJECT 5: HOW LONG 'TIL BLACK FUTURE MONTH? BY N.K. JEMISIN
PROJECT 6: THE SHORT STORIES OF OSCAR WILDE BY OSCAR WILDE
PROJECT 7: THE BLUE FAIRY BOOK BY ANDREW LANG
PROJECT 8: GRAND UNION: STORIES BY ZADIE SMITH
PROJECT 9: THE BEST OF ROALD DAHL BY ROALD DAHL
PROJECT 10: LOVE AND FREINDSHIP BY JANE AUSTEN
PROJECT 11: HOMESICK FOR ANOTHER WORLD BY OTTESSA MOSHFEGH
PROJECT 12: BAD FEMINIST BY ROXANE GAY
PROJECT 12.5: DIFFICULT WOMEN BY ROXANE GAY
PROJECT 13: THE SHORT NOVELS OF JOHN STEINBECK
PROJECT 14: FIRST PERSON SINGULAR BY HARUKI MURAKAMI
PROJECT 15: THE ORIGINAL FOLK AND FAIRY TALES OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM
PROJECT 16: A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN BY LUCIA BERLIN
STORY 1: ANGEL'S LAUNDROMAT
sheesh. you can immediately tell lucia berlin was That Bitch.
i kept rereading paragraphs but it could have either been due to lack of focus on my part or because i really wanted them to sink in, like when you replay your favorite song because you weren't appreciating it enough.
let's err on the side of positivity for once.
rating: 3.5
STORY 2: DR. H.A. MOYNIHAN
this made me dearly miss my grandpa, who - while not a maniacal and disturbing dentist indulging in raging alcoholism - was a kind of ornery old guy with a penchant for jack daniels.
or maybe it was just that phoebe bridgers' cover of summer's end came on shuffle while i was reading this.
either/or.
rating: 4
STORY 3: STARS AND SAINTS
i have spent, as i write these little notes in my little notebook that i will later transfer to my little goodreads, most of the past 48 hours in public. as someone with untreated (but diagnosed!) anxiety that is rapidly devolving into agoraphobia, that means i have spent most of the same period believing myself so horrifically awkward it warrants execution.
this made me feel better.
rating: 4
STORY 4: A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN
i always expect a lot from title stories.
here, i was right to.
rating: 5
STORY 5: MY JOCKEY
a one pager. bold.
update: i later learned this was one of the only stories lucia berlin wrote to be recognized in her lifetime, so i feel stupid for not liking it as much as some of the others...but i don't. so.
speaking my truth.
rating: 3.75
STORY 6: EL TIM
i hated reading this but that was maybe the point?
this felt like ottessa moshfegh, and surrounded by the other stories in this collection it made me like ottessa moshfegh less.
rating: none
STORY 7: POINT OF VIEW
i just fell in love.
i'm in love with this story.
it'll be an autumn wedding and you're all invited.
rating: 5
STORY 8: HER FIRST DETOX
i'm like 1/8 of the way through this collection and already dreading finishing it.
rating: 5
STORY 9: PHANTOM PAIN
it do be like that. that's all i can say.
rating: 4.5
STORY 10: TIGER BITES
all of these stories are:
- excellent
- semi-autobiographical
- in an endlessly confusing way.
rating: 4.5
STORY 11: EMERGENCY ROOM NOTEBOOK, 1977
very grateful for a year to ground me. i have no f*cking idea when most of these take place.
rating: 3.5
STORY 12: TEMPS PERDU
too gross for me. i'm sensitive.
rating: 3
STORY 13: CARPE DIEM
i am getting some anxiety rep with devastating accuracy here.
rating: 4.5
STORY 14: TODA LUNA, TODO ANO
well f*ck. this was nice.
this book is giving me so precisely what i need that it feels like a prescription.
i read this on a plane fleeing the same goddamn place the protagonist of this story is fleeing.
rating: 4.5
STORY 15: GOOD AND BAD
i love when i feel kind of meh about a story and then i come back here to write that and see the title i noted down earlier and go "OH! well that changes things."
rating: 3.5
STORY 16: MELINA
this one is kind of basic and silly, but with the same stunning writing, and it made me remember the others are truly brilliant.
rating: 3
STORY 17: FRIENDS
like the last one, but improving from the cliché and trite.
rating: 4
STORY 18: UNMANAGEABLE
addiction is very scary.
the least hot take of all time, but this story knocked the sense out of me.
rating: 4
STORY 19: ELECTRIC CAR, EL PASO
allow me to reflect on what the hell this one means.
rating: none
STORY 20: SEX APPEAL
in a shocking twist, it turns out the men of hollywood have ALWAYS used their power and charisma to be f*cking disgusting.
rating: 3.75
STORY 21: TEENAGE PUNK
i am such a d*ck. here i am adoring this book for like 18 consecutive stories and then have two i like but don't love and nearly pitch a fit.
thanks for winning me over anyway, lucia.
rating: 4.5
STORY 22: STEP
good song. one of vampire weekend's best.
lucia berlin published three volumes of stories in her time, none of which garnered much attention, and then this little number was published a decade after her death and near-inexplicably sold more than all three of them combined in a matter of weeks.
this may include most of the stories in those three, but i don't care. this is good enough that i'm tracking down all of them.
rating: 4.5
STORY 23: STRAYS
it's a metaphor, see. you put the double meaning right in the title but you don't give it the power till the ending.
rating: 4.5
STORY 24: GRIEF
well now i am just petrified of having my relationship with my sisters turn out like this.
more importantly, people just don't go on holiday like they used to. that's something i've learned from this project.
rating: 4
STORY 25: BLUEBONNETS
people are scary. in multitudinous ways for countless reasons.
men especially.
rating: 3.5
STORY 26: LA VIE EN ROSE
a few days ago, i was fleeing a place i hate and had run out of reading material just before my flight. the universe smiled upon me because there was an outpost of one of my favorite indie bookstores in the terminal (and when is there ever anything but hudson news anymore), and then full on grinned because there was exactly one copy of this book left - which had been on my to-read list since i saw it in the non-airport location of said bookstore.
so i grabbed it, spent the remaining time before my flight walking around, boarded, sat in my seat, hit shuffle on my spotify (in which i only have, like, 2 playlists named variations of "songs i like" with hundreds of entries), and thought my thoughts.
for some reason, i was turning the phrase "la vie en rose" around in my head, thinking of lucy dacus's cover of that song, wondering if it was still in my playlist because i hadn't heard it in a while, when boom - the song ends, the next song plays, and it's "la vie en rose." out of hundreds. right at the moment i considered it.
i was so stunned i wanted to take my earbuds out and tell someone, but i am not that person, so i did a :o face to myself and picked this book up. skimmed the table of contents, which i don't usually do but for occasions with short stories.
and then - no f*cking way. a story, midway down the list's second page: "la vie en rose."
life is quite fantastic, from time to time.
this is pretty wonderful too.
rating: 4.5
STORY 27: MACADAM
little and lovely.
rating: 4
STORY 28: DEAR CONCHI
even lucia berlin's love stories are so realistic it hurts my feelings. reading this story at the same time as a rom-com felt like a moment to moment reality check.
rating: 4
STORY 29: FOOL TO CRY
lucia has so many self-insert names for herself. lou, lu, carlotta, dolores...but at the same time there's like 5 stories about each one. are they the same character? are they not? am i supposed to put two and two together or would that make seven? ARGH.
anyway, any protagonist who says things like "I decided to use the word dear instead of expensive from now on" and answers the question what do you find boring with "Nothing, actually. I've never been bored" is a special favorite to me.
AND a great last line? lucia, you spoil me.
rating: 5
STORY 30: MOURNING
reminds me of that sally rooney quote: “If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.”
but this is prettier and subtler.
rating: 5
STORY 31: PANTEON DE DOLORES
these stories are so good i want to mansplain them. the reversal of the traditional definitions of "lonely" versus "alone"...
rating: 5
STORY 32: SO LONG
i paused this story halfway to buy every lucia berlin book i could find.
rating: 5
STORY 33: A LOVE AFFAIR
i can't keep adoring multiple characters per story like this. i'm a hater. i'm not built to hold so much in my heart.
rating: 5
STORY 34: LET ME SEE YOU SMILE
so it turns out a story about an adult sleeping with a minor is never going to work for me. not if the genders are reversed, not if it's written by sally rooney, not if it's written by lucia berlin. f*cking grossos.
i will say it's funny how lucia wrote a self-insert character and then had every other character compliment her at length.
rating: 2.5
STORY 35: MAMA
killer of an ending.
rating: 4.5
STORY 36: CARMEN
carmen, from the latin, name of the roman goddess of childbirth.
god f*cking damn, lucia.
rating: 5
STORY 37: SILENCE
these perfect stories oh my god. i feel like i'm going insane. too much five star content at once, it's hurting my brain functioning, i'm destroyed, i'm melting, it's the wicked witch of the west without the flying monkeys over here.
rating: 5
STORY 38: MIJITO
the empathy here. i can't even review these beyond exclamations anymore.
rating: 5
STORY 39: 502
another new name for lucia's fictional versions of herself: lucille. far out.
rating: 4
STORY 40: HERE IT IS SATURDAY
oh god. this time lucia wrote a character that is herself so that every other character can compliment her, but this time it's a freedom writers / finding forrester / white savior goes to school situation. the character's last name is even six letters beginning BE.
thanks for making it a slight bit easier to say bye, lu.
great ending, though.
rating: 3
STORY 41: B.F. AND ME
silly and little and nice.
rating: 4
STORY 42: WAIT A MINUTE
this was so beautiful and real that i spent the whole story trying to keep it at a distance. i knew if it clicked into place for me it would be too, too much.
f*ck. it still was anyway.
rating: 5 but more if i could
STORY 43: HOMING
the last one. i'm sorry for what i said about you making it easier to say bye, lucia. i didn't mean it.
oh, no. of course this one would be extraordinary.
i want to cry.
rating: 5 and still more if i could
OVERALL
this book knocked me out. i don't know what to tell you. never in my life has a collection of stories done anything like this to me.
i'll be thinking about this forever, in a million different ways.
rating: 5
April 22, 2017
I know already, just four stories in, that this will be a 5-Star read for me. And that a few weeks from now—because I am reading slowly, to savor each bit— I will struggle to pick my favorites from the forty-two short stories collected here. So this review contains tidbits from those stories which most capture my heart and brain and I will update as I move along.
Angel's Laundromat
A laundromat . . . that transient, warm, sad space . . . where we watch others sorting, folding, watching us... But mostly we're all just waiting. It's a waiting space. One of the loneliest. Berlin captures this loneliness, and the chance encounters possible if we happen to catch the eye of someone else sitting in those miserable molded plastic seats.
Dr. H.A. Moynihan
Wherein a young girl yanks out all her Grandpa's teeth. Not quite as vicious as it sounds, but also not for the faint of heart. Fabulous. Brutal.
Stars and Saints
Lucia Berlin comes up with these sentences, buried amidst all her brilliant sentences, that make me ache to write. This, That day on the playground I knew that never in my life was I going to get in. It's a brilliant opening line, don't you think? One I'd like to craft an entire story around. Yet it's just one in a collection of such lines in this wry, strange and sad little story.
A Manual for Cleaning Women
Oh. This. Ache. Melancholy. Grief. The beauty of being present. Like the laundromat, Berlin takes us into another transient, lonely space. Here it is a city bus, where one sees the same faces traveling the same routes, where relationships are built from habit and shared experience, in those brief, moving encounters.
El Time
Every high school teacher's nightmare: the student who is smarter, stronger, full of cunning and allure.
Her First Detox
A mother of four sons, a successful teacher, awakens in a detox unit without any knowledge of how she got there, or memories of her most recent binge to become the darling of the ward. Sweet, tender, devastating.
Emergency Room Notebook, 1977 and Temps Perdu
Both stories gleaned from the author's experiences working in hospital wards. Good deaths and bad deaths, Code Threes and Code Blues. Spare, unflinching, brilliant.
Todo Luna, Todo Año
A middle-aged English teacher on holiday at a Mexican beach resort. Love, tragedy, scuba diving. Heartbreaking. Beautiful.
Melina
Short story perfection. One of those you'd teach in an English class because it's so elegantly, precisely constructed, with a BAM ending.
Unmanageable
The horror of alcohol addiction rendered in three tight, devastating pages.
Strays
I read this aloud, because the language was so powerful. The sentences like knife cuts and hammer blows. The content so upsetting. This story will stay with me for a long time to come.
Grief, Fool to Cry, Panteón de Dolores, Mama, Wait A Minute
There are a string of stories, starting with the aforementioned Todo Luna, Todo Año featuring the two sisters Sally and Dolores, connected but not- each is a sketch, a study, a new angle on the motif of these sisters' shared and disparate experiences. Sally, long a resident of Mexico City, is dying of cancer; Dolores arrives to care for her, and their perspectives are threaded through in moments of reflection and tangled action/reaction. Mexico City, in its frenetic rush to live and die furiously, noisily, with color and music and trampling feet, becomes a character in its own right.
Carmen, Mijito
Berlin conveys despair in such a way that despite yourself, you cannot look away. These young woman speak directly to the reader with such a lack of spite, bitterness, regret; their lives are a series of horrors, yet each moves through like a bird through a storm cloud. The best and worst of the human condition live in these stories.
Silence
A young girl's voice, heard/no heard, as she navigates the terrible world of adults, seeking beauty. Will she end up just like them?
Time stops with each story in this collection. These are not easy reads and I needed a deep breath and some distance after each story. But Berlin's is some of the most astonishing writing I have read. Ever. It pains me that it has taken so long for us to recognize her power and mastery, that she will never know how deeply she has affected this new generation of readers. But do yourself a favor. Make it a priority to read this collection- take all the time you need, dip in and out, but know that you will finish a different human being than when you started.
Angel's Laundromat
A laundromat . . . that transient, warm, sad space . . . where we watch others sorting, folding, watching us... But mostly we're all just waiting. It's a waiting space. One of the loneliest. Berlin captures this loneliness, and the chance encounters possible if we happen to catch the eye of someone else sitting in those miserable molded plastic seats.
Dr. H.A. Moynihan
Wherein a young girl yanks out all her Grandpa's teeth. Not quite as vicious as it sounds, but also not for the faint of heart. Fabulous. Brutal.
Stars and Saints
Lucia Berlin comes up with these sentences, buried amidst all her brilliant sentences, that make me ache to write. This, That day on the playground I knew that never in my life was I going to get in. It's a brilliant opening line, don't you think? One I'd like to craft an entire story around. Yet it's just one in a collection of such lines in this wry, strange and sad little story.
A Manual for Cleaning Women
Oh. This. Ache. Melancholy. Grief. The beauty of being present. Like the laundromat, Berlin takes us into another transient, lonely space. Here it is a city bus, where one sees the same faces traveling the same routes, where relationships are built from habit and shared experience, in those brief, moving encounters.
El Time
Every high school teacher's nightmare: the student who is smarter, stronger, full of cunning and allure.
Her First Detox
A mother of four sons, a successful teacher, awakens in a detox unit without any knowledge of how she got there, or memories of her most recent binge to become the darling of the ward. Sweet, tender, devastating.
Emergency Room Notebook, 1977 and Temps Perdu
Both stories gleaned from the author's experiences working in hospital wards. Good deaths and bad deaths, Code Threes and Code Blues. Spare, unflinching, brilliant.
Todo Luna, Todo Año
A middle-aged English teacher on holiday at a Mexican beach resort. Love, tragedy, scuba diving. Heartbreaking. Beautiful.
Melina
Short story perfection. One of those you'd teach in an English class because it's so elegantly, precisely constructed, with a BAM ending.
Unmanageable
The horror of alcohol addiction rendered in three tight, devastating pages.
Strays
I read this aloud, because the language was so powerful. The sentences like knife cuts and hammer blows. The content so upsetting. This story will stay with me for a long time to come.
Grief, Fool to Cry, Panteón de Dolores, Mama, Wait A Minute
There are a string of stories, starting with the aforementioned Todo Luna, Todo Año featuring the two sisters Sally and Dolores, connected but not- each is a sketch, a study, a new angle on the motif of these sisters' shared and disparate experiences. Sally, long a resident of Mexico City, is dying of cancer; Dolores arrives to care for her, and their perspectives are threaded through in moments of reflection and tangled action/reaction. Mexico City, in its frenetic rush to live and die furiously, noisily, with color and music and trampling feet, becomes a character in its own right.
Carmen, Mijito
Berlin conveys despair in such a way that despite yourself, you cannot look away. These young woman speak directly to the reader with such a lack of spite, bitterness, regret; their lives are a series of horrors, yet each moves through like a bird through a storm cloud. The best and worst of the human condition live in these stories.
Silence
A young girl's voice, heard/no heard, as she navigates the terrible world of adults, seeking beauty. Will she end up just like them?
Sighs, the rhythms of our heartbeats, contractions of childbirth, orgasms, all flow into time just as the pendulum clocks placed next to one another son beat in unison. Fireflies in a tree flash on and off as one .The sun comes up and it foes down. The moon waxes and wanes and usually the morning paper hits the porch at six thirty-five.
Time stops when someone dies.
Time stops with each story in this collection. These are not easy reads and I needed a deep breath and some distance after each story. But Berlin's is some of the most astonishing writing I have read. Ever. It pains me that it has taken so long for us to recognize her power and mastery, that she will never know how deeply she has affected this new generation of readers. But do yourself a favor. Make it a priority to read this collection- take all the time you need, dip in and out, but know that you will finish a different human being than when you started.
July 3, 2020
Lydia Davis, en el prólogo al libro, nos dice que “Parte de la chispa de la prosa de Lucia está en el ritmo: a veces fluido y tranquilo, equilibrado, espontáneo y fácil; y a veces entrecortado, telegráfico, veloz.” Gustándome la mayor parte de los relatos, mi entusiasmo con el libro se debe más a los segundos, los entrecortados, los que parecen saltar caprichosamente de memoria en memoria.
Seguramente tenga toda razón Davis cuando adjudica el adjetivo espontáneo al primer bloque de cuentos. Sin embargo, son los del segundo los que a mí me han transmitido un mayor aire de libertad, una mayor sensación de "verdad", de falta de filtros, y más me han emocionado. A esa capacidad para emocionarme se suma (más bien, se multiplica) su capacidad para sorprenderme, su inteligencia para sugerir mucho con muy poco, su habilidad para envolver en sonrisas, ya compasivas ya alegres ya amargas, la tristeza, la desilusión, la añoranza que rezuman muchos de sus relatos.
Lucía es una mujer con un enorme atractivo físico y personal, con una mirada que te atrapa y te somete, y no me refiero solo a sus ojos, preciosos, sino también a como esos ojos ven, a como esos ojos nos ven y, por encima de todo, a como ven a Lucía. Contradiciendo a la cita de Huidobro que encabeza uno de los mejores cuentos (“A ver esa sonrisa”), esa mirada, esos ojos, atraen más que la tumba, quizás porque trasmiten lo mismo que ella. Cualquiera hubiera podido advertirle aquello que le auguró una adivina: tendrás muchos amores y muchos problemas. Estar cerca de ella debió de ser lo más parecido a estar en el cielo y en el infierno al mismo tiempo, incluso de forma simultánea. Una persona impredecible, contradictoria, intensa tanto para lo bueno como para lo malo, incapaz de evitar la tentación, de sustraerse al placer del momento o de evitar el dolor momentáneo sin que las consecuencias que sus actos puedan tener sobre sí misma o en los demás pasen en ningún momento por su cabeza o tengan la fuerza suficiente para retener sus instintos. Alabo el conocimiento que tenía de sí misma y su valentía al afrontar su interior y hacernos partícipes de él (fantástico y terrible la verdad de Silencio). Y, aunque nos pone delante su infancia y la relación que mantuvo con su madre, no tengo la impresión de que Lucía se parapete tras ese escudo, al menos no totalmente. En fin, qué terrible y qué maravilloso tuvo que ser estar a su lado.
Seguramente tenga toda razón Davis cuando adjudica el adjetivo espontáneo al primer bloque de cuentos. Sin embargo, son los del segundo los que a mí me han transmitido un mayor aire de libertad, una mayor sensación de "verdad", de falta de filtros, y más me han emocionado. A esa capacidad para emocionarme se suma (más bien, se multiplica) su capacidad para sorprenderme, su inteligencia para sugerir mucho con muy poco, su habilidad para envolver en sonrisas, ya compasivas ya alegres ya amargas, la tristeza, la desilusión, la añoranza que rezuman muchos de sus relatos.
Lucía es una mujer con un enorme atractivo físico y personal, con una mirada que te atrapa y te somete, y no me refiero solo a sus ojos, preciosos, sino también a como esos ojos ven, a como esos ojos nos ven y, por encima de todo, a como ven a Lucía. Contradiciendo a la cita de Huidobro que encabeza uno de los mejores cuentos (“A ver esa sonrisa”), esa mirada, esos ojos, atraen más que la tumba, quizás porque trasmiten lo mismo que ella. Cualquiera hubiera podido advertirle aquello que le auguró una adivina: tendrás muchos amores y muchos problemas. Estar cerca de ella debió de ser lo más parecido a estar en el cielo y en el infierno al mismo tiempo, incluso de forma simultánea. Una persona impredecible, contradictoria, intensa tanto para lo bueno como para lo malo, incapaz de evitar la tentación, de sustraerse al placer del momento o de evitar el dolor momentáneo sin que las consecuencias que sus actos puedan tener sobre sí misma o en los demás pasen en ningún momento por su cabeza o tengan la fuerza suficiente para retener sus instintos. Alabo el conocimiento que tenía de sí misma y su valentía al afrontar su interior y hacernos partícipes de él (fantástico y terrible la verdad de Silencio). Y, aunque nos pone delante su infancia y la relación que mantuvo con su madre, no tengo la impresión de que Lucía se parapete tras ese escudo, al menos no totalmente. En fin, qué terrible y qué maravilloso tuvo que ser estar a su lado.
April 11, 2018
Warning: Skip the two introductions to the book, unless you want to know how many of the stories end before you read them. In the case of the audio book, skip ahead to track 15 of CD 1. What were the people who wrote the introductions, and then the people who let them do it, thinking?!
A beautiful collection of short stories that inspire compassion and imagination. The multiple audiobook readers did well. Given how the book is autobiographically inspired and the author was fluent in Spanish, it would have been better if the readers had checked the occassional Spanish words included. Also, would have enjoyed knowing who each reader was.
A beautiful collection of short stories that inspire compassion and imagination. The multiple audiobook readers did well. Given how the book is autobiographically inspired and the author was fluent in Spanish, it would have been better if the readers had checked the occassional Spanish words included. Also, would have enjoyed knowing who each reader was.
September 3, 2015
I first met Lucia Berlin in 1991 as the significant other of one of her sons, who remains my closest friend. Though I knew she wrote short stories, it was something that was mentioned in passing and I never seemed to make the time to read them. I am thankful that I didn't. My age and experiences have just added to the thrill of discovering her writing now. I wish you could be here to see this, Lucia. Your time has come.
I was a little afraid to read this book. What if I didn't like it? Or think it was good? I wanted to have a good perspective so I read new stories by Alice Munro, Hilary Mantell, Elizabeth McCracken, Edith Pearlman… and then I started "A Manual for Cleaning Women". I'm not sure what I expected but I did not expect the brilliance that I found. I absolutely LOVE this book. I have laughed out loud, I have shed tears and marveled at the language. But more than anything, I see myself in a different way with the light of her writing shining on me. Entertainment Weekly has it right. If you read one book this summer, read this one.
I was a little afraid to read this book. What if I didn't like it? Or think it was good? I wanted to have a good perspective so I read new stories by Alice Munro, Hilary Mantell, Elizabeth McCracken, Edith Pearlman… and then I started "A Manual for Cleaning Women". I'm not sure what I expected but I did not expect the brilliance that I found. I absolutely LOVE this book. I have laughed out loud, I have shed tears and marveled at the language. But more than anything, I see myself in a different way with the light of her writing shining on me. Entertainment Weekly has it right. If you read one book this summer, read this one.
December 26, 2021
Lucia Berlin, wrote about complex subjects with effortless clarity—her no-nonsense short stories were written with amazing depth and breath. She used examples from her own life to illustrate the human experiences through very personal psychological aspects.
Phenomenal introduction….of the highest praise for Lucia Berlin: excellent and fascinating.
“Strangers will tell you their whole life story” ..…
“Mama will ruin your favorite movie” ….
Every topic, every theme — in no chronological order — including potato chips and the kitchen sink were explored….
….dreams, humor, sorrow, death, addiction, abuse, estrangement, sobs, sickness, denied peace, working class women, marriages, childhood, sisters, parenting, babies, violence, housecleaning, therapy, alcoholism, sobriety, prison, teaching, writing, nursing, cities, streets, states, countries……
and every emotion fill these forty-three stories.
God, life, sin, faith, Mexican bars, or cowboy bars, the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s,
walk or climb for miles, grandfathers, kissing, plays, Italian movies, Albuquerque, Berkeley, New Mexico, Mexico City, Colorado, Chile, California, Adobe houses, gin and tonic, music, books, poems, coffee, Patsy Cline,, Walt Whitman, people who are not afraid to be corny, the desert, the foothills, dust storms, dancing, coyotes, pregnancies, unwanted pregnancies, people who remember things,
quiet men, chatterbox women, sadness, sweet things, writing short stories……
“Only write about what you feel”…..
reading over and over, roommates, thinking about Joe, pizza, beer, Jane Austen, chamber music,
English major in college,
janitors, old couples,, cottonwood trees, stars, college dorms, a sore face from smiling, happiness in Chile, weekend adventures,
Hot Springs, read out loud, track meets, house mothers, jealousy, being in love, the future, love for a Latin person, uninspiring advice from Mama, sister Sally, nicotine, feeling pretty and grown-up, flirting, more Gin, ships in the harbor,
“no one was ever going to hurt me again”….
shame, lots of drunkenness, more abuse, Alaska, frozen lakes, skiing, silence, polar bears, fishing, wolves, Grizzlies and mountain goats, Theaters,
Cast parties, bad behavior, babies ripped from a mother‘s breast, eskimo women, Texas,, war, money, poverty, drinking more and more, home, traveling, loneliness, traveling schools, runaways, expelled from school,
“once I didn’t speak for six months and Mama called me the bad seed”….
…..blackouts for more drunkenness, Arizona, a little happiness for short sober periods, fear, sneering, self protection, elegance and beautiful things, poker playing with priests, young pretty, and having a future was hard on Mama, (poor pitiful mama), husbands, kids playing outside, old cars, pregnancy, exhaustion, frustration, hopelessness, grief, disability, construction jobs, coAddicts and enablers,
cough syrup, TV watching, Levi’s, sunsets,
“what’s the matter with me, I was crying again?”….
the lousy things about drugs,
El Paso, jail, emergencies, three failed marriages, single motherhood, four sons, teen years In Santiago, maid work, nursing, teaching,
cap drivers, neighborhoods that flashed by, skating as a kid, pretending, and not being able to pretend, nail polish, fancy clothes, dangerous drug scoring, babies, valium pills, a baby and a drug free bed in a house filled with drugs and people shooting up with heroin, mountain mining towns, going overseas, tall and childlike, The exclusive Radcliffe school for girls, a scholarship, dressed like a ragamuffin and lived in the slums, the library, accused of stealing, stealing, accused wrongly, kids at Saint Joseph hated the poverty kid,
Home was bad and school was bad… both were scary..
more ‘not talking’,
playing jacks as a kid, mothers yelling, dark humor, characters re-appear in stories, (a few interlinked stories),
“so happy to have a friend”….[Hope was a true friend]
childhood games played with a knife,
“Looking back… It seemed I went through a type of orientation”…..
learned cuss words in English in Spanish, kids play, adolescents, adulthood, travel, helped roll out bread on a ping-pong table, afternoon of washing bloody menstrual rags, welfare, food stamps, Taco Bell, Solidad prison, in fighting and yelling, little houses in Oakland, fear, afraid to go outside, illegal immigrants, prejudice bigotry, loneliness, despair, misogyny, exhaustion, ETC…..
Self-deprecating—unsentimental (yet sad)—HARD KNOCK LIFE stories….INTENSE - PERSONAL - SEMI-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL -storytelling.
Brutal - but brilliant writing…..
Lucia Berlin died in 2004.
Phenomenal introduction….of the highest praise for Lucia Berlin: excellent and fascinating.
“Strangers will tell you their whole life story” ..…
“Mama will ruin your favorite movie” ….
Every topic, every theme — in no chronological order — including potato chips and the kitchen sink were explored….
….dreams, humor, sorrow, death, addiction, abuse, estrangement, sobs, sickness, denied peace, working class women, marriages, childhood, sisters, parenting, babies, violence, housecleaning, therapy, alcoholism, sobriety, prison, teaching, writing, nursing, cities, streets, states, countries……
and every emotion fill these forty-three stories.
God, life, sin, faith, Mexican bars, or cowboy bars, the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s,
walk or climb for miles, grandfathers, kissing, plays, Italian movies, Albuquerque, Berkeley, New Mexico, Mexico City, Colorado, Chile, California, Adobe houses, gin and tonic, music, books, poems, coffee, Patsy Cline,, Walt Whitman, people who are not afraid to be corny, the desert, the foothills, dust storms, dancing, coyotes, pregnancies, unwanted pregnancies, people who remember things,
quiet men, chatterbox women, sadness, sweet things, writing short stories……
“Only write about what you feel”…..
reading over and over, roommates, thinking about Joe, pizza, beer, Jane Austen, chamber music,
English major in college,
janitors, old couples,, cottonwood trees, stars, college dorms, a sore face from smiling, happiness in Chile, weekend adventures,
Hot Springs, read out loud, track meets, house mothers, jealousy, being in love, the future, love for a Latin person, uninspiring advice from Mama, sister Sally, nicotine, feeling pretty and grown-up, flirting, more Gin, ships in the harbor,
“no one was ever going to hurt me again”….
shame, lots of drunkenness, more abuse, Alaska, frozen lakes, skiing, silence, polar bears, fishing, wolves, Grizzlies and mountain goats, Theaters,
Cast parties, bad behavior, babies ripped from a mother‘s breast, eskimo women, Texas,, war, money, poverty, drinking more and more, home, traveling, loneliness, traveling schools, runaways, expelled from school,
“once I didn’t speak for six months and Mama called me the bad seed”….
…..blackouts for more drunkenness, Arizona, a little happiness for short sober periods, fear, sneering, self protection, elegance and beautiful things, poker playing with priests, young pretty, and having a future was hard on Mama, (poor pitiful mama), husbands, kids playing outside, old cars, pregnancy, exhaustion, frustration, hopelessness, grief, disability, construction jobs, coAddicts and enablers,
cough syrup, TV watching, Levi’s, sunsets,
“what’s the matter with me, I was crying again?”….
the lousy things about drugs,
El Paso, jail, emergencies, three failed marriages, single motherhood, four sons, teen years In Santiago, maid work, nursing, teaching,
cap drivers, neighborhoods that flashed by, skating as a kid, pretending, and not being able to pretend, nail polish, fancy clothes, dangerous drug scoring, babies, valium pills, a baby and a drug free bed in a house filled with drugs and people shooting up with heroin, mountain mining towns, going overseas, tall and childlike, The exclusive Radcliffe school for girls, a scholarship, dressed like a ragamuffin and lived in the slums, the library, accused of stealing, stealing, accused wrongly, kids at Saint Joseph hated the poverty kid,
Home was bad and school was bad… both were scary..
more ‘not talking’,
playing jacks as a kid, mothers yelling, dark humor, characters re-appear in stories, (a few interlinked stories),
“so happy to have a friend”….[Hope was a true friend]
childhood games played with a knife,
“Looking back… It seemed I went through a type of orientation”…..
learned cuss words in English in Spanish, kids play, adolescents, adulthood, travel, helped roll out bread on a ping-pong table, afternoon of washing bloody menstrual rags, welfare, food stamps, Taco Bell, Solidad prison, in fighting and yelling, little houses in Oakland, fear, afraid to go outside, illegal immigrants, prejudice bigotry, loneliness, despair, misogyny, exhaustion, ETC…..
Self-deprecating—unsentimental (yet sad)—HARD KNOCK LIFE stories….INTENSE - PERSONAL - SEMI-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL -storytelling.
Brutal - but brilliant writing…..
Lucia Berlin died in 2004.
July 2, 2020
I had never heard of this author before until coming across it in Goodreads. I am once thankful for this website…if it weren’t for several readers who said that they really liked this book, I would not have read this great collection of short stories. The book consists of 41 short stories by Lucia Berlin primarily pulled from her books published from 1981-1999. The book presents a good chunk of her writing as her total number of short stories written is 76.
The average length of the short stories are 8-15 pages, shortest one is 1 page and longest one is 31. Lucia Berlin battled alcoholism for a number of years of her life — I only bring that up because there are a lot of alcoholic characters in her stories, and because we are told in the foreword by Lydia Davis that many of the stories are based on events in her own life. One of her sons said, after her death, “Ma wrote true stories, not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes….Our family stories and memories have been slowly reshaped, embellished, and edited to the extent that I’m not sure what really happened all the time. Lucia said this didn’t matter: the story is the thing.” Lydia Davis in the Foreward states that Lucia did invent fictional characters and events…so this collection shouldn’t be read as a memoir verbatim.
I thought the writing was extremely good. Her writing was evocative. Not verbose. Most of the stories held my attention. One of her stories made me tear up (Mourning). Some stories were very sad, and some perhaps not for the faint of heart. In fact Maureen Corrigan in her review of the book on NPR [National Public Radio] says “If you want consolation or uplift from your short stories, look elsewhere.” A link to her review is below.
I made special note of five stories I really liked: “Stars and Saints,” “Good and Bad,” “Electric Car, El Paso,” “Grief,” “Mourning,” and “Homing”. I should also note that she did something interesting…there were two short stories that were separate from each other but that were linked….one began “Silence” (320) where the other left off “Stars and Saints” (p. 17).
I still remember one phrase that I really liked — a protagonist was looking down from a roof onto a highway some distance away and saw the cars as “a bracelet of headlights”. Oh, and I learned a new word: ‘alpenglow’ (an optical phenomenon that appears as a horizontal reddish glow near the horizon opposite to the Sun when the solar disk is just below the horizon. This effect is easily visible when mountains are illuminated, but can also be seen when clouds are lit through backscatter.).
Lydia Davis at the time of this collection was published (2015) said that: “I have always had faith that the best writers will rise to the top, like cream, sooner or later, and will become exactly as well known as they should be — their work talked about, quoted, taught, performed, filmed, set to music, anthologized. Perhaps with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves.”
I second that. 😊 And indeed it did gain her attention — I just went to Wikipedia to see if there was something of interest to post with my review and was so glad to see that this book “hit The New York Times bestseller list in its second week…The collection was ineligible for most of the year-end awards (either because she was deceased, or it was recollected material), but was named to a large number of year-end lists, including the New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2015”. 😊 Here is the link to the Wikipedia webpage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_B...
Reviews:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/bo... (Jim: The reviewer [Dwight Garner] very much liked the collection but thought it could be shortened by 50%. And that is my only criticism of the collection - if one could call it that: I would recommend reading maybe several stories at a time and making a decision to read this over a matter of weeks….rather than trying to do it in one long slog without looking at other books, which is what I did.)
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
https://www.npr.org/2015/08/24/432748...
The average length of the short stories are 8-15 pages, shortest one is 1 page and longest one is 31. Lucia Berlin battled alcoholism for a number of years of her life — I only bring that up because there are a lot of alcoholic characters in her stories, and because we are told in the foreword by Lydia Davis that many of the stories are based on events in her own life. One of her sons said, after her death, “Ma wrote true stories, not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes….Our family stories and memories have been slowly reshaped, embellished, and edited to the extent that I’m not sure what really happened all the time. Lucia said this didn’t matter: the story is the thing.” Lydia Davis in the Foreward states that Lucia did invent fictional characters and events…so this collection shouldn’t be read as a memoir verbatim.
I thought the writing was extremely good. Her writing was evocative. Not verbose. Most of the stories held my attention. One of her stories made me tear up (Mourning). Some stories were very sad, and some perhaps not for the faint of heart. In fact Maureen Corrigan in her review of the book on NPR [National Public Radio] says “If you want consolation or uplift from your short stories, look elsewhere.” A link to her review is below.
I made special note of five stories I really liked: “Stars and Saints,” “Good and Bad,” “Electric Car, El Paso,” “Grief,” “Mourning,” and “Homing”. I should also note that she did something interesting…there were two short stories that were separate from each other but that were linked….one began “Silence” (320) where the other left off “Stars and Saints” (p. 17).
I still remember one phrase that I really liked — a protagonist was looking down from a roof onto a highway some distance away and saw the cars as “a bracelet of headlights”. Oh, and I learned a new word: ‘alpenglow’ (an optical phenomenon that appears as a horizontal reddish glow near the horizon opposite to the Sun when the solar disk is just below the horizon. This effect is easily visible when mountains are illuminated, but can also be seen when clouds are lit through backscatter.).
Lydia Davis at the time of this collection was published (2015) said that: “I have always had faith that the best writers will rise to the top, like cream, sooner or later, and will become exactly as well known as they should be — their work talked about, quoted, taught, performed, filmed, set to music, anthologized. Perhaps with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves.”
I second that. 😊 And indeed it did gain her attention — I just went to Wikipedia to see if there was something of interest to post with my review and was so glad to see that this book “hit The New York Times bestseller list in its second week…The collection was ineligible for most of the year-end awards (either because she was deceased, or it was recollected material), but was named to a large number of year-end lists, including the New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2015”. 😊 Here is the link to the Wikipedia webpage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_B...
Reviews:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/19/bo... (Jim: The reviewer [Dwight Garner] very much liked the collection but thought it could be shortened by 50%. And that is my only criticism of the collection - if one could call it that: I would recommend reading maybe several stories at a time and making a decision to read this over a matter of weeks….rather than trying to do it in one long slog without looking at other books, which is what I did.)
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
https://www.npr.org/2015/08/24/432748...
February 13, 2016
I wasn't going to review this book. I really wasn't. Because how does one even begin to go about describing what it feels like to be in love? Ok, maybe that's hyperbolic, but at the same time I'm feeling the same excitement and utter loss for words. I almost skipped this book because of all the hype. Because that's the kind of person I am. I figured there's no way I won't be disappointed by a book getting this much press and acclaim. But I am here to tell you that I, the coldest heart this side of the Mississippi, always ready and willing to hate, believe the hype is entirely justified and that this book needs more. This collection of short stories is a masterpiece.
I've only had this feeling with a few other authors. Shirley Jackson, Lydia Davis, Vladimir Nabokov. You just have a moment when you're reading where you go "wow, this person is actually a literary genius and I am not worthy." Prepare yourself for that feeling. Lucia Berlin is incredible in the least pretentious way possible. When you read her stories it's like being told a story by a friend. Granted, a friend who's seen a lot of life. Her writing is beautiful without it being easy to put your finger on why. Not a word is wasted and her voice is so strong and compelling. Normally I mark a bunch of passages that I like, but I had to give up with Berlin, because I loved it all so much. I was running out of book darts.
The stories in this book are a selection of her best works put in order chronologically. What's brilliant about this is that Lucia Berlin writes very autobiographical stories. It essentially feels like you're growing beside her, like you're watching her life unfold. And this lady has been through all sorts of shit. For a while she lived in mining camps in America, then she moved to Chile where she lived flamboyantly into her 20s. She moved back to America and lived much less flamboyantly. She worked as a maid. She was married 3 times, had some kids, had some affairs, and struggled with alcoholism for most of her life. Most of her stories are about poverty, alcoholism, relationships, family, death. That's part of why I thought I wouldn't be interested, but I was wrong. Berlin is sharp as a tack, she has all sorts of hutzpah, and boy can she tell a story (often in only a few pages or less).
I still really don't know what to say about this collection of short stories. I'm tongue-tied. I don't want to try to describe the pieces, because I know they'll all fall flat in my summation. All I can ask is that you please take the time to AT LEAST read this excerpt from it. "Carpe Diem" was one of the stories that really got to me and you can read it online here. I'm so grateful to have read A Manual for Cleaning Women. I genuinely feel lucky to have had the opportunity, which is an incredible feeling to have after reading a book. I want you to feel that too.
Full review: Outlandish Lit
I've only had this feeling with a few other authors. Shirley Jackson, Lydia Davis, Vladimir Nabokov. You just have a moment when you're reading where you go "wow, this person is actually a literary genius and I am not worthy." Prepare yourself for that feeling. Lucia Berlin is incredible in the least pretentious way possible. When you read her stories it's like being told a story by a friend. Granted, a friend who's seen a lot of life. Her writing is beautiful without it being easy to put your finger on why. Not a word is wasted and her voice is so strong and compelling. Normally I mark a bunch of passages that I like, but I had to give up with Berlin, because I loved it all so much. I was running out of book darts.
"After a long time the cranes did come. Hundreds, just as the sky turned blue-gray. They had landed in slow motion on brittle legs. Washing, preening on the bank. Everything was suddenly black and white and gray, a movie after the credits, churning.
As the cranes drank upstream the silver water beneath them was shot into dozens of thin streamers. Then very quickly the birds left, in whiteness, with the sound of shuffling cards."
The stories in this book are a selection of her best works put in order chronologically. What's brilliant about this is that Lucia Berlin writes very autobiographical stories. It essentially feels like you're growing beside her, like you're watching her life unfold. And this lady has been through all sorts of shit. For a while she lived in mining camps in America, then she moved to Chile where she lived flamboyantly into her 20s. She moved back to America and lived much less flamboyantly. She worked as a maid. She was married 3 times, had some kids, had some affairs, and struggled with alcoholism for most of her life. Most of her stories are about poverty, alcoholism, relationships, family, death. That's part of why I thought I wouldn't be interested, but I was wrong. Berlin is sharp as a tack, she has all sorts of hutzpah, and boy can she tell a story (often in only a few pages or less).
"Women’s voices always rise two octaves when they talk to cleaning women or cats."
I still really don't know what to say about this collection of short stories. I'm tongue-tied. I don't want to try to describe the pieces, because I know they'll all fall flat in my summation. All I can ask is that you please take the time to AT LEAST read this excerpt from it. "Carpe Diem" was one of the stories that really got to me and you can read it online here. I'm so grateful to have read A Manual for Cleaning Women. I genuinely feel lucky to have had the opportunity, which is an incredible feeling to have after reading a book. I want you to feel that too.
"The only reason I have lived so long is that I let go of my past. Shut the door on grief on regret on remorse. If I let them in, just one self-indulgent crack, whap, the door will fling open gales of pain ripping through my heart blinding my eyes with shame breaking cups and bottles knocking down jars shattering windows stumbling bloody on spilled sugar and broken glass terrified gagging until with a final shudder and sob I shut the heavy door. Pick up the pieces one more time."
Full review: Outlandish Lit
April 3, 2020
Por más que me lo he ido dosificando... se me ha acabado terminando. En las cincuenta primeras páginas ya sabía que esta obra era especial, que me iba a maravillar y que iba a ser significativa en mi vida.
Yo no soy un gran admirador de los libros de relatos porque la desigual calidad de la mayoría de las recopilaciones me suele mosquear: pero es que aquí no hay relatos buenos y malos, aquí hay relatos buenos y excelentes.
Me ha calado mucho como Lucia relata episodios inconexos que, conforme avanzas, descubres que de inconexos tienen poco. Me ha fascinado ser espectador de los relatos que retratan una vida propia y muchas vidas ajenas y paralelas.
Algunos de ellos (el que da título al libro, el de los pescadores, el del aborto, el de las vacaciones con su hermana, el de la la muerte en México, el de la choza de la playa...) forman ya parte de mi imaginario personal. Me parece que, si no los he vivido, como mínimo los he visto en el cine.
Sus adicciones, la crianza de sus hijos, sus oficios, sus matrimonios... me han hecho descubrir a una mujer fascinante de la que ahora lo quiero saber todo.
Qué grande es la historia de la literatura, que nos tiene escondidas a ojos vistas auténticas obras maestras como esta.
Yo no soy un gran admirador de los libros de relatos porque la desigual calidad de la mayoría de las recopilaciones me suele mosquear: pero es que aquí no hay relatos buenos y malos, aquí hay relatos buenos y excelentes.
Me ha calado mucho como Lucia relata episodios inconexos que, conforme avanzas, descubres que de inconexos tienen poco. Me ha fascinado ser espectador de los relatos que retratan una vida propia y muchas vidas ajenas y paralelas.
Algunos de ellos (el que da título al libro, el de los pescadores, el del aborto, el de las vacaciones con su hermana, el de la la muerte en México, el de la choza de la playa...) forman ya parte de mi imaginario personal. Me parece que, si no los he vivido, como mínimo los he visto en el cine.
Sus adicciones, la crianza de sus hijos, sus oficios, sus matrimonios... me han hecho descubrir a una mujer fascinante de la que ahora lo quiero saber todo.
Qué grande es la historia de la literatura, que nos tiene escondidas a ojos vistas auténticas obras maestras como esta.
December 1, 2015
What a wonderful discovery: how is it possible only few of us knew of Lucia Berlin? Hard core readers should all be in love with her without question. Her stories are pitch perfect: witty, unpredictable,funny, tragic, sad. Her humor is oblique, original. The stories are so personal, clearly autobiographical, and I wonder if there were a few - about her alcoholism so painful to read - that she may have not wanted to see them published. No matter how self destructive she may have been, there is always joy, love and lust for life in each story, a spark of hope. And what a beautiful woman she was.
(four stars instead of five only because in this pretty thick collection, a few stories were weaker than others and slightly repoetitive. But only a few.... )
(four stars instead of five only because in this pretty thick collection, a few stories were weaker than others and slightly repoetitive. But only a few.... )
September 22, 2021
Uzun zamandır bu kadar güzel bir öykü kitabı okumamıştım. Aslında öykü demek ne kadar doğru onu da tam bilmiyorum, zira okudukça birbirini tamamlayan bölümleriyle Lucia Berlin'in hayatının farklı dönemlerinde gezindiğinizi hissediyorsunuz. Evet otobiyografik bir roman olmasa da yazarın kendi hayatından çokça izler taşıyor. Yazarın oldukça zor bir hayatı olduğunu görüyorsunuz lakin kendisi bu hayatı bütün dürüstlüğüyle, kendisine acımadan, hatta bolca kara mizahla harmanlayıp; zor bir hayatı sanata dönüştürüp okuruna sunuyor. Çok az kelimeyle çok fazla şey anlatan kadınlardan, çok beğendim. Amerikan kadın öykücüleri seviyorsanız, bu kitap favoriniz olacak. Mutlaka okıuyun.
March 19, 2016
Reading this collection of short stories was a little like going to MOMA and admiring a piece of modern art you know nothing about. At first you think, hmm, it's kinda neat, but then the harder you look the more the beauty shines through.
As the stories unfold in A Manual for Cleaning Women you realize they are all loosely connected, that there is a strand of consciousness. Gradually, Berlin's words begin to eat away at you.
I won't say I loved this book but what I will say is that her words haunted me.
As the stories unfold in A Manual for Cleaning Women you realize they are all loosely connected, that there is a strand of consciousness. Gradually, Berlin's words begin to eat away at you.
I won't say I loved this book but what I will say is that her words haunted me.
November 24, 2015
I am obviously missing something as, try as I might, I couldn't find the delight/wonder/magnificence in these stories that every other reviewer seems to have found. The hugely overlong introduction and foreword hugely distracted me as expectations were raised so high (for me) that the stories could not possibly deliver...Maybe I need to return to this at another time...but really not keen
March 1, 2020
I am not a good reader of short stories. I find them anticlimactic. And they don’t stick in my memory the way a novel does.
It was the window of a bookshop in the center of Madrid that first presented me Lucia Berlin. I was walking around with friends after a tapas round and we all took notice of the very alluring exhibit. I can’t identify what intrigued me about the way her books were displayed.
Soon after one of the friends gave me this volume . Had I gone to buy it, realizing that it was not a novel would have probably prevented me from purchasing it.
Gifts are very often blessed gifts.
When I began reading it, however, the usual anticlimactic effect of short stories prompted an even greater puzzling response. I felt very uncomfortable with some of the episodes and began to wonder how much longer it would take me to finish the volume. The dreariness and the bleakness were so discouraging, offputting even. It made me think of the tetralogy of Elena Ferrante with their depiction of Neapolitan misery and wondered what was different between them –apart from the very Americanness and the very Italianness— why one elicited a certain rebuff while the other one just glued me. I wondered whether Berlin’s accounts rang more true and therefore more hopeless.
Anyway, about half-way through the collection, suddenly something clicked in my mind and I realized that the stories could be conceived as a single novel -- a sort of partly fictionalised autobiography -- and that I had missed the whole point behind the various accounts. Consequently I thought that I was a pretty stupid reader.
So, this is half a review – I want to reread the book paying attention to how the fragmented accounts can form a single narrative with a continuity of sorts and then come back to this writeup. And yet, after realizing my stupidity I went back to the introductions (one excellent by Lydia Davis) and then saw that no, this is officially a collection of stories, and the selection and order in this edition is not Lucia Berlin’s but Stephen Emerson’s- So, my new conception of this being a novel is most probably a stupid one. This could not be another Cortazar’sRayuela.
Or maybe not. I have to read it again – as a novel – and see what my conclusion will be.
I am also now fascinated (obsessed?) by Berlin’s writing.
March 8, 2022
4.5★
“Afterward we went to a Chinese restaurant. But it was closing. ‘Yes, we always arrive when it’s closing. That’s when they order takeout pizza.’
How they had originally found this out I can’t imagine. They introduced me to the waiter and we gave him money. Then we sat around a big table with the waiters and chefs and dishwashers, eating pizzas and drinking Cokes. The lights were off; we ate by candlelight. They were all speaking Chinese, nodding to us as they passed around different kinds of pizza. I felt somehow that I was in a real Chinese restaurant.”
Lucia Berlin’s stories have been much acclaimed for a long time. The quotation above is typical of them only in the unusual juxtaposition of people and circumstances. Mostly, she writes from her own life, not in any order, and many of the stories feature alcoholics, drug addicts, violent encounters, and/or living a free-and-easy life with a kind of abandon.
I can’t begin to summarise anything, about the stories. It’s enough to say that each has its own appeal. Some are rough and raw and uncomfortable, and some are tender and insightful, with characters from young children to extremely old people. There has been a fair bit written about her work, so I’ll just add a bit from the biography and a few quotes I liked. The stories aren’t written as if they’re autobiographical, but they obviously come from her life.
Her own life is outlined at the end of the book, and it must have been an unusual one. She was certainly striking looking. This is a common publicity shot from 1963, taken by her then husband, jazz musician Buddy Berlin.
Lucia Berlin, 1963, by Buddy Berlin
She was born in Alaska in 1936 where her father was a miner, so she began life in mining camps. In one story, “she” (the narrator) is five, and Kent Shreve is her boyfriend/best friend.
“As far back as I can remember I have made a very bad first impression. That time in Montana when all I was trying to do was get Kent Shreve’s socks off so we could go barefoot but they were pinned to his drawers.”
You can imagine what the adults must have made of that! In 1941, her father was off to war, so her mother moved the two girls to El Paso, where grandfather was a dentist and a drunk. (Doesn’t bear thinking about!) Here’s a quote from one story, which takes on a whole new meaning when you know who the dentist is.
“I hated St. Joseph’s. Terrified by the nuns, I struck Sister Cecilia one hot Texas day and was expelled. As punishment, I had to work every day of summer vacation in Grandpa’s dental office.”
After the war, they all moved to Chile, where mother was a drunk while she played hostess to father’s guests, like Prince Aly Khan, and had what the editor refers to as a “rather flamboyant existence.”
In 1955, she went to the University of New Mexico. She married a sculptor, mixed with writers and musicians, married Buddy Berlin, a jazz musician, and began to write. Her settings range from little kids playing, older kids experimenting, ER hospital worker, and many others, including, of course, cleaning women. This is from the title story.
“Some lady at a bridge party somewhere started the rumor that to test the honesty of a cleaning woman you leave little rosebud ashtrays around with loose change in them, here and there. My solution to this is to always add a few pennies, even a dime.”
This is a pair of young friends on a sleepover.
“We stayed awake waiting to hear his parents doing it but they never did. I asked him what he thought it was like. He held his hand up to mine so our fingers were all touching, had me run my thumb and forefinger over our touching ones. You can’t tell which is which. Must be something like that he said.”
From one of the hospital stories.
“I like my job in Emergency. Blood, bones, tendons seem like affirmations to me. I am awed by the human body, by its endurance. Thank God—because it’ll be hours before X-ray or Demerol. Maybe I’m morbid. I am fascinated by two fingers in a baggie, a glittering switchblade all the way out of a lean pimp’s back. I like the fact that, in Emergency, everything is reparable, or not.”
A discussion of death, also in the hospital.
“Mr. Gionotti’s death was good.
. . .
“There were a lot of them, sitting, standing, touching, smoking, laughing sometimes. I felt I was present at a celebration, a family reunion. One thing I do know about death. The ‘better’ the person, the more loving and happy and caring, the less of a gap that person’s death makes. When Mr. Gionotti died, well, he was dead, and Mrs. Gionotti wept, they all did, but they all went weeping off together, and with him, really.”
There were stories in Mexico. Occasionally there are recurring characters or overlapping stories. There are one-night stands, short dalliances, and longer love affairs. Most include sensual, languid scenes, where couples almost accidentally just happen to make love, and they make you wonder what her young life was like. She certainly has a good understanding of people living in pent-up, nervous America compared to laid-back Hispanic countries.
“Solitude is an Anglo-Saxon concept. In Mexico City, if you’re the only person on a bus and someone gets on they’ll not only come next to you, they will lean against you.”
From another story:
“I miss the moon. I miss solitude. In Mexico there is never not anyone else there. If you go into your room to read somebody will notice you’re by yourself and go keep you company.”
There is an especially sensual, sexual holiday affair in a Mexican village, where American visitor Eloise convinces a local fisherman to teach her to scuba dive and they end up entwined underwater.
Terrific writer. These are five-star stories, no doubt, but I recommend reading them piecemeal, not one after another. I read too many in a row, and it made it feel repetitious, but I’m afraid that’s my fault, not the author’s or the editor’s.
More here: http://luciaberlin.com/
“Afterward we went to a Chinese restaurant. But it was closing. ‘Yes, we always arrive when it’s closing. That’s when they order takeout pizza.’
How they had originally found this out I can’t imagine. They introduced me to the waiter and we gave him money. Then we sat around a big table with the waiters and chefs and dishwashers, eating pizzas and drinking Cokes. The lights were off; we ate by candlelight. They were all speaking Chinese, nodding to us as they passed around different kinds of pizza. I felt somehow that I was in a real Chinese restaurant.”
Lucia Berlin’s stories have been much acclaimed for a long time. The quotation above is typical of them only in the unusual juxtaposition of people and circumstances. Mostly, she writes from her own life, not in any order, and many of the stories feature alcoholics, drug addicts, violent encounters, and/or living a free-and-easy life with a kind of abandon.
I can’t begin to summarise anything, about the stories. It’s enough to say that each has its own appeal. Some are rough and raw and uncomfortable, and some are tender and insightful, with characters from young children to extremely old people. There has been a fair bit written about her work, so I’ll just add a bit from the biography and a few quotes I liked. The stories aren’t written as if they’re autobiographical, but they obviously come from her life.
Her own life is outlined at the end of the book, and it must have been an unusual one. She was certainly striking looking. This is a common publicity shot from 1963, taken by her then husband, jazz musician Buddy Berlin.
Lucia Berlin, 1963, by Buddy Berlin
She was born in Alaska in 1936 where her father was a miner, so she began life in mining camps. In one story, “she” (the narrator) is five, and Kent Shreve is her boyfriend/best friend.
“As far back as I can remember I have made a very bad first impression. That time in Montana when all I was trying to do was get Kent Shreve’s socks off so we could go barefoot but they were pinned to his drawers.”
You can imagine what the adults must have made of that! In 1941, her father was off to war, so her mother moved the two girls to El Paso, where grandfather was a dentist and a drunk. (Doesn’t bear thinking about!) Here’s a quote from one story, which takes on a whole new meaning when you know who the dentist is.
“I hated St. Joseph’s. Terrified by the nuns, I struck Sister Cecilia one hot Texas day and was expelled. As punishment, I had to work every day of summer vacation in Grandpa’s dental office.”
After the war, they all moved to Chile, where mother was a drunk while she played hostess to father’s guests, like Prince Aly Khan, and had what the editor refers to as a “rather flamboyant existence.”
In 1955, she went to the University of New Mexico. She married a sculptor, mixed with writers and musicians, married Buddy Berlin, a jazz musician, and began to write. Her settings range from little kids playing, older kids experimenting, ER hospital worker, and many others, including, of course, cleaning women. This is from the title story.
“Some lady at a bridge party somewhere started the rumor that to test the honesty of a cleaning woman you leave little rosebud ashtrays around with loose change in them, here and there. My solution to this is to always add a few pennies, even a dime.”
This is a pair of young friends on a sleepover.
“We stayed awake waiting to hear his parents doing it but they never did. I asked him what he thought it was like. He held his hand up to mine so our fingers were all touching, had me run my thumb and forefinger over our touching ones. You can’t tell which is which. Must be something like that he said.”
From one of the hospital stories.
“I like my job in Emergency. Blood, bones, tendons seem like affirmations to me. I am awed by the human body, by its endurance. Thank God—because it’ll be hours before X-ray or Demerol. Maybe I’m morbid. I am fascinated by two fingers in a baggie, a glittering switchblade all the way out of a lean pimp’s back. I like the fact that, in Emergency, everything is reparable, or not.”
A discussion of death, also in the hospital.
“Mr. Gionotti’s death was good.
. . .
“There were a lot of them, sitting, standing, touching, smoking, laughing sometimes. I felt I was present at a celebration, a family reunion. One thing I do know about death. The ‘better’ the person, the more loving and happy and caring, the less of a gap that person’s death makes. When Mr. Gionotti died, well, he was dead, and Mrs. Gionotti wept, they all did, but they all went weeping off together, and with him, really.”
There were stories in Mexico. Occasionally there are recurring characters or overlapping stories. There are one-night stands, short dalliances, and longer love affairs. Most include sensual, languid scenes, where couples almost accidentally just happen to make love, and they make you wonder what her young life was like. She certainly has a good understanding of people living in pent-up, nervous America compared to laid-back Hispanic countries.
“Solitude is an Anglo-Saxon concept. In Mexico City, if you’re the only person on a bus and someone gets on they’ll not only come next to you, they will lean against you.”
From another story:
“I miss the moon. I miss solitude. In Mexico there is never not anyone else there. If you go into your room to read somebody will notice you’re by yourself and go keep you company.”
There is an especially sensual, sexual holiday affair in a Mexican village, where American visitor Eloise convinces a local fisherman to teach her to scuba dive and they end up entwined underwater.
Terrific writer. These are five-star stories, no doubt, but I recommend reading them piecemeal, not one after another. I read too many in a row, and it made it feel repetitious, but I’m afraid that’s my fault, not the author’s or the editor’s.
More here: http://luciaberlin.com/
January 30, 2016
"A Manual For Cleaning Women" is a collection of 43 stories about women in all kinds of demanding jobs: cleaning woman, laundry hand, teacher, doctor's assistant, ER nurse, ward clerk, and switchboard operator. Most of these stories are autobiographical. The lives of these women - broken, wretched, heart-breaking - are veiled versions of Berlin's own. This comes close to a 5-star read.
Berlin had a tumultuous childhood, dysfunctional parents and grandparents who drink, three failed marriages, four children she raised on her own, and a very long addiction to alcohol. The stories - raw, gritty, biting, honest - bear her battle scars. Yet, there is in these painful stories a reservoir of self-denigrating humor, a gleeful self-reproach that bubbles up from the crackpots of the women's lives and erupts into emancipating laughter. Perhaps, there is saving grace in not taking oneself too seriously and redemption in being able to laugh at or cry over one's folly.
In the story, "Point of View", the narrator, a single woman in her 50s, contemplates writing her life story. She is in love with the doctor she works for but who disdains and despises her affection for him. Most of Berlin's stories in the book are just like this one where nothing much happens. They are about women who work to make ends meet, take a bus home, eat a meagre dinner, do laundry and groceries on Saturday, and buy the Sunday Chronicle. Folks who are compelled by their life circumstances to endless labor can identify with this: "I'm having a hard time writing about Sunday. Getting the long hollow feeling of Sundays. No mail and faraway lawn mowers, the hopelessness."
There are comic stories such as "Stars and Saints" about the author as an impish child expelled for hitting a nun or "Dr. H. A. Moynihan" about her half-crazed, drunk and racist grandfather who was a dentist. There are moving stories (e.g.,"Grief") about the author caring for her dying sister. A poignant story is "Wait A Minute" that conveys how time is changed by terminal illness and stopped by death. Individuals who have given care to loved ones suffering from terminal disease can relate to this: "...time turns sadistically slow. Death just hangs around while you wait for it to be night and then wait for it to be morning. Every day you've said good-bye a little."
A large number of stories (e.g., "Unmanageable", "Step", "Strays") offer a staggering revelation of how lives are lost to alcohol and mangled in detox centers. I have to say I am completely worn out by a surfeit of moral laxity and a sense of helplessness and hopelessness. I am also alarmed at my own feelings of revulsion and a hardening that begin to steal over me as these stories repeat themselves many times over. "Let Me See You Smile", for example, is one of those deeply disturbing stories where one's milk of human kindness dries up at the unconscionable ways in which the children of parents who drink are neglected and abused.
Special mention ought to be made of a powerful story titled "Here it is Saturday". Inmates in a correctional facility are taught story writing. It is wonderful to read how the medium of writing allows them to get in touch with their deepest needs and to connect with others. I believe this is testament to the way writing plays a significant role in helping Berlin to reconstruct her life. That the desperate struggles with alcohol feature so prominently in these stories suggest how powerful a stronghold it had over her.
Much as I enjoy Berlin's writing and wit in this collection of stories, I am glad to have finally finished this "manual". If there were fewer stories that kept pounding the same depressing themes, this would have been an exceptional book. Less is more.
August 11, 2024
"Cleaning women do steal. Not the things the people we work for are so nervous about. It is the superfluity that finally gets to you. We don’t want the change in the little ashtrays.
Some lady at a bridge party somewhere started the rumor that to test the honesty of a cleaning woman you leave little rosebud ashtrays around with loose change in them, here and there. My solution to this is to always add a few pennies, even a dime.
The minute I get to work I first check out where the watches are, the rings, the gold lamé evening purses. Later when they come running in all puffy and red-faced I just coolly say 'Under your pillow, behind the avocado toilet.' All I really steal is sleeping pills, saving up for a rainy day."--Lucia Berlin, excerpt from "A Manual for Cleaning Women," a story in the collection with the same name.
That's a funny line, but later you learn Berlin's mother committed suicide, and Berlin herself was suicidal, an alcoholic who damaged herself and so many people through that, and you shudder.
I had had this on my list for awhile, but when the NY Times did their poll of 100 best books of the first quarter of the century, I began listening to it, though after three brilliant stories I ordered the book, since I want to underline half of the sentences. Made me laugh aloud many times because it is actually funny, but also just for the insight of it, the honesty about poverty, sex, abuse, alcoholism. 15 hours of listening to her best stories, 43 stories across three collections, and listening to it is wonderful, to have her voice in your head, but fiction this great you don't just listen to it, imho.
Berlin died on her birthday in 2004 when she was 68; I had just met her and miss/mourn her already. She grew up in mining camps in Alaska and the mid-west, she was an abused and lonely child in wartime Texas; she was for a time a rich and privileged young woman in Santiago; a bohemian loft-living hipster in 50s New York; and an ER nurse in 70s inner-city Oakland. She was in fact a cleaning woman, one of her most astonishing stories. By the age of 32 she had been married three times, had four sons and was battling a chronic alcohol addiction.
Since I am daily living a family addiction experience (not my own) every day now, sometimes in very real crisis, of course, it was hard to read "My First Detox" and related stories where she admitted she neglected her kids, left lovers, quit jobs. You think of Raymond Carver and his drunk stories, but these extend into life on the edge, working class job stories. Someone told me these are essentially her autobiography, and seem to be arranged somewhat chronologically, so as we say now, auto-fiction. Some are stylish, style-focused, like the title story, but most are stripped down, she's just talking to you in a bar, or on a porch, a survivor telling you the truth so now you tell yours.
Writing in The New York Times, Ruth Franklin said Berlin’s stories “are the kind a woman in a Tom Waits song might tell a man she’s just met during a long humid night spent drinking in a parking lot.”
And Chekhov. Who loves his flawed people.
Even the cruel, alcoholic mother who appears in several stories is not a demon. “She was witty”, the narrator’s sister says in "Mama." “You have to admit it. Like when she’d give panhandlers a nickel and say, ‘Excuse me, young man, but what are your dreams and aspirations?’ Or when a cab driver was surly she’d say, ‘You seem rather thoughtful and introspective today.'"
“She hated the word love. She said it the way people say the word slut.” Regretting that they didn’t make up before her mother’s suicide, the younger sister says: 'If only I could have been able to speak to her. If I had let her know how much I loved her.' Me, I have no mercy.”
In another story: "I don’t like Diane Arbus. When I was a kid in Texas there were freak shows and even then I hated the way people would point at the freaks and laugh at them. But I was fascinated too. I loved the man with no arms who typed with his toes. But it wasn’t the no arms that I liked. It was that he really wrote, all day. He was seriously writing something, liking what he was writing."
I bought the book and will take my sweet time reading it, story by story. And I warn you, they are not all sweet in content, but they great.
Here's a little gift for ya; Berlin worked in ER for years. Here is her story "My Jockey," a story in one page: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories...
You want to know more about her before you decide to read her? Lydia Davis writes the preface, a fan, and here is a piece Davis wrote for The New Yorker about her:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-...
Some lady at a bridge party somewhere started the rumor that to test the honesty of a cleaning woman you leave little rosebud ashtrays around with loose change in them, here and there. My solution to this is to always add a few pennies, even a dime.
The minute I get to work I first check out where the watches are, the rings, the gold lamé evening purses. Later when they come running in all puffy and red-faced I just coolly say 'Under your pillow, behind the avocado toilet.' All I really steal is sleeping pills, saving up for a rainy day."--Lucia Berlin, excerpt from "A Manual for Cleaning Women," a story in the collection with the same name.
That's a funny line, but later you learn Berlin's mother committed suicide, and Berlin herself was suicidal, an alcoholic who damaged herself and so many people through that, and you shudder.
I had had this on my list for awhile, but when the NY Times did their poll of 100 best books of the first quarter of the century, I began listening to it, though after three brilliant stories I ordered the book, since I want to underline half of the sentences. Made me laugh aloud many times because it is actually funny, but also just for the insight of it, the honesty about poverty, sex, abuse, alcoholism. 15 hours of listening to her best stories, 43 stories across three collections, and listening to it is wonderful, to have her voice in your head, but fiction this great you don't just listen to it, imho.
Berlin died on her birthday in 2004 when she was 68; I had just met her and miss/mourn her already. She grew up in mining camps in Alaska and the mid-west, she was an abused and lonely child in wartime Texas; she was for a time a rich and privileged young woman in Santiago; a bohemian loft-living hipster in 50s New York; and an ER nurse in 70s inner-city Oakland. She was in fact a cleaning woman, one of her most astonishing stories. By the age of 32 she had been married three times, had four sons and was battling a chronic alcohol addiction.
Since I am daily living a family addiction experience (not my own) every day now, sometimes in very real crisis, of course, it was hard to read "My First Detox" and related stories where she admitted she neglected her kids, left lovers, quit jobs. You think of Raymond Carver and his drunk stories, but these extend into life on the edge, working class job stories. Someone told me these are essentially her autobiography, and seem to be arranged somewhat chronologically, so as we say now, auto-fiction. Some are stylish, style-focused, like the title story, but most are stripped down, she's just talking to you in a bar, or on a porch, a survivor telling you the truth so now you tell yours.
Writing in The New York Times, Ruth Franklin said Berlin’s stories “are the kind a woman in a Tom Waits song might tell a man she’s just met during a long humid night spent drinking in a parking lot.”
And Chekhov. Who loves his flawed people.
Even the cruel, alcoholic mother who appears in several stories is not a demon. “She was witty”, the narrator’s sister says in "Mama." “You have to admit it. Like when she’d give panhandlers a nickel and say, ‘Excuse me, young man, but what are your dreams and aspirations?’ Or when a cab driver was surly she’d say, ‘You seem rather thoughtful and introspective today.'"
“She hated the word love. She said it the way people say the word slut.” Regretting that they didn’t make up before her mother’s suicide, the younger sister says: 'If only I could have been able to speak to her. If I had let her know how much I loved her.' Me, I have no mercy.”
In another story: "I don’t like Diane Arbus. When I was a kid in Texas there were freak shows and even then I hated the way people would point at the freaks and laugh at them. But I was fascinated too. I loved the man with no arms who typed with his toes. But it wasn’t the no arms that I liked. It was that he really wrote, all day. He was seriously writing something, liking what he was writing."
I bought the book and will take my sweet time reading it, story by story. And I warn you, they are not all sweet in content, but they great.
Here's a little gift for ya; Berlin worked in ER for years. Here is her story "My Jockey," a story in one page: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories...
You want to know more about her before you decide to read her? Lydia Davis writes the preface, a fan, and here is a piece Davis wrote for The New Yorker about her:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-...
September 28, 2016
Las historias de Lucia Berlin son pequeñas píldoras de efectividad y potencia narrativa, deslumbrantes vistazos a una realidad que podríamos calificar de cotidiana o peregrina, pero que en realidad esconde un apasionante registro de experiencias extraordinarias. Si repasamos un poco la biografía de la autora, descubrimos a una mujer que llevó una vida fascinante y vertiginosa, no exenta de demoledores reveses, desplazamientos continuos, fracasos sentimentales e incluso una agonizante batalla contra el alcohol que la arrastraría hasta los rincones más oscuros que se puedan imaginar. No obstante, gracias a los relatos que encontramos en este libro, dichos fondos dejan de ser accesibles solo mediante la imaginación y pasan a convertirse en una siniestra galería de demonios personales que, entiendo, Lucia Berlin ha tratado aquí de expurgar. En Manual para mujeres de la limpieza encontramos historias protagonizadas casi siempre por mujeres que representan de un modo u otro alguna faceta de la propia Lucia Berlin. Desde limpiadora doméstica hasta profesora de secundaria, pasando por recepcionista o enfermera en una sala de urgencias, las protagonistas de estos relatos son entrañables iteraciones de una misma personalidad —inteligente, divertida y autodestructiva— que enfrentan el desastre (sea que venga en forma de enfermedad, muerte de un ser querido o decepción amorosa), la escasez de recursos para sacar la familia adelante o las complicadas relaciones entre madre e hija con una entereza digna de admiración. Y a pesar del carácter repetitivo y redundante que ensombrece en cierta medida su sobresaliente capacidad narrativa, uno no puede más que rendirse ante la palpitante verdad y naturalidad sin reservas que desprende la escritura de Lucia Berlin, indisciplinada, ingeniosa, carente de observaciones innecesarias e impregnada de un irresistible magnetismo que te arrastra en apenas un par de párrafos hacia las vísceras del relato. Lo malo (o no, depende de cómo se mire) de este libro, quizá, es que ha de acometerse con una paciencia de la que carezco. Tras leer de un tirón la primera mitad del volumen, tuve que aparcarlo durante un tiempo y espaciar su lectura precisamente por esa sensación de estar abordando siempre los mismos temas una y otra vez. Aparte de eso, lo cierto es que Manual para mujeres de la limpieza es un libro totalmente recomendable, imprescindible incluso, que se encuentra entre lo más destacable y estimulante que he leído durante los últimos meses y que sin duda merece toda la atención que está recibiendo. Ahora queda de vuestra parte decidir si os sumáis o no a este magnífico fenómeno.
April 17, 2016
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin is an amazingly wonderful collection of short stories. They share themes and characters so in some ways this collection shares some of the feeling of a novel but each story is a complete, vivid moment in itself. The people are so realized that I found myself thinking of them as real-more real in some ways than people who are actually alive since I got to know these people so much better than you can get to know most people you meet. Especially the female character, who seems in many ways to be a stand-in for Berlin.
The pacing is perfect. There is a painful humor throughout these stories, which are marked by suffering. I finished sad that I would not be with this book as a companion. One of the things I like about short stories is I know I will be able to reread them more often than a novel. I took this out from the library but went out and bought it after reading some of the stories. I knew this was a book I wanted to own and cherish.
According to the brief descriptions, Berlin's life was apparently full of adventure and suffering. She communicates these qualities beautifully in her work, although the adventures are mostly emotional. Like Berlin, the narrator of many of the stories struggles with alcoholism, the death of her sister, a sadly dysfunctional family and intense love affairs. But to sum up the work this way is, I think, to miss the point.
The point, at least what I took from the stories, was that Berlin creates an intense experience of life in these stories that includes but also transcends the suffering within them.
It was an incredible reading experience. Although the stories are short, I couldn't read them quickly. They are dense and full of life.
I strongly recommend this book.
The pacing is perfect. There is a painful humor throughout these stories, which are marked by suffering. I finished sad that I would not be with this book as a companion. One of the things I like about short stories is I know I will be able to reread them more often than a novel. I took this out from the library but went out and bought it after reading some of the stories. I knew this was a book I wanted to own and cherish.
According to the brief descriptions, Berlin's life was apparently full of adventure and suffering. She communicates these qualities beautifully in her work, although the adventures are mostly emotional. Like Berlin, the narrator of many of the stories struggles with alcoholism, the death of her sister, a sadly dysfunctional family and intense love affairs. But to sum up the work this way is, I think, to miss the point.
The point, at least what I took from the stories, was that Berlin creates an intense experience of life in these stories that includes but also transcends the suffering within them.
It was an incredible reading experience. Although the stories are short, I couldn't read them quickly. They are dense and full of life.
I strongly recommend this book.
April 16, 2021
3.5
I had no preconceptions going into this volume of short stories, even vaguely wondered if it might be a translation due to my unfamiliarity with the name of the author and my maybe knowing ahead of time (from blurbs) that some of the stories’ locales are Mexico and South America. Though Berlin knew some Spanish, she’s an English writer, born in the United States, who led an extraordinary life—a life that fuels all of her stories. Due to this fueling, some of the stories, read close together, come to seem repetitive, as if she’s working out her themes. She likely was. As only one example, several stories about her sister culminate in “Wait a Minute,” the penultimate, and my favorite, of the collection. Her descriptions of time in this gorgeous story are masterful.
Though some stories might seem throwaways, they all juxtapose humor and darkness in varying degrees, are quirky and unique, none reminding me of any other writer. I could make a case for a better tighter collection if it held fewer stories, but in the long run, especially for her fans, it’s probably nice to have these all together.
Most of her stories have great endings, including “Mijito,” the story of a young immigrant mother that not only broke my heart but shattered it into little pieces. And as I finished the last paragraph of the last story and realized it was the last, I experienced a sense of loss—and satisfaction.
I had no preconceptions going into this volume of short stories, even vaguely wondered if it might be a translation due to my unfamiliarity with the name of the author and my maybe knowing ahead of time (from blurbs) that some of the stories’ locales are Mexico and South America. Though Berlin knew some Spanish, she’s an English writer, born in the United States, who led an extraordinary life—a life that fuels all of her stories. Due to this fueling, some of the stories, read close together, come to seem repetitive, as if she’s working out her themes. She likely was. As only one example, several stories about her sister culminate in “Wait a Minute,” the penultimate, and my favorite, of the collection. Her descriptions of time in this gorgeous story are masterful.
Though some stories might seem throwaways, they all juxtapose humor and darkness in varying degrees, are quirky and unique, none reminding me of any other writer. I could make a case for a better tighter collection if it held fewer stories, but in the long run, especially for her fans, it’s probably nice to have these all together.
Most of her stories have great endings, including “Mijito,” the story of a young immigrant mother that not only broke my heart but shattered it into little pieces. And as I finished the last paragraph of the last story and realized it was the last, I experienced a sense of loss—and satisfaction.
November 20, 2020
"The short story is the literature of the nomad"
I just read this marvelous sentence in John Cheever's essay "Why I Write Short Stories" and Lucia Berlin came instantaneously to mind. There's no better way to describe her work and I feel compelled to add it here.
This is one of the best collection of short stories I've ever read!
If I were a writer I wish I could write exactly like she did. With all the undercurrent emotion that's flowing through her cool prose and no-frills sentences. Such a shame she didn't get the recognition she deserved while she lived; it would have made her life easier but not necessarily richer. Apparently she lived it to the full and used a lot of her experiences as material for these stories. That's why they are authentic and unapologetic and almost all found their way to my heart.
She managed to make a narrative of her life, rendering it even worthier, in her own unique way.
Who wouldn't have wished for such an accomplishment?!
Και στα ελληνικά:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...
I just read this marvelous sentence in John Cheever's essay "Why I Write Short Stories" and Lucia Berlin came instantaneously to mind. There's no better way to describe her work and I feel compelled to add it here.
This is one of the best collection of short stories I've ever read!
If I were a writer I wish I could write exactly like she did. With all the undercurrent emotion that's flowing through her cool prose and no-frills sentences. Such a shame she didn't get the recognition she deserved while she lived; it would have made her life easier but not necessarily richer. Apparently she lived it to the full and used a lot of her experiences as material for these stories. That's why they are authentic and unapologetic and almost all found their way to my heart.
She managed to make a narrative of her life, rendering it even worthier, in her own unique way.
Who wouldn't have wished for such an accomplishment?!
Και στα ελληνικά:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...
January 15, 2021
I’ve read Berlin’s short story, “My Pony”, multiple times because.....well you’ll just have to read it to discover her gritty and witty writing for yourself. She’s wacky and she teeters on the edge of propriety but her storytelling is never boring and it flips from howlingly funny to bittersweet memories.
Starting one of her stories meant I would not get up again until it was finished, unable to break the flow and compelled to follow her flawed characters or bask in her luscious descriptions of South America, Mexico, and the American southwest. I had not the slightest interest in horse racing, but out of the blue she has made me love a jockey and his horse and that final scene is imprinted on my brain.
Every single one of these stories is masterful storytelling.
Starting one of her stories meant I would not get up again until it was finished, unable to break the flow and compelled to follow her flawed characters or bask in her luscious descriptions of South America, Mexico, and the American southwest. I had not the slightest interest in horse racing, but out of the blue she has made me love a jockey and his horse and that final scene is imprinted on my brain.
Every single one of these stories is masterful storytelling.
April 25, 2018
Least likely to say : raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, these are a few of my favourite things. Tra la la, life is a blast. Fling open the windows and breathe in the scent of gladiolas and nightingales.
Most likely to say : one pint of Jim Beam, two pints of Jim Beam, three pints of Jim Beam. Those were a few of my favourite things. But now they're gone. And it's five in the morning, and the stores aren't open yet.
Most likely to say : one pint of Jim Beam, two pints of Jim Beam, three pints of Jim Beam. Those were a few of my favourite things. But now they're gone. And it's five in the morning, and the stores aren't open yet.
November 3, 2021
sen yıllar boyu bir yandan zorlu işlerde çalışıp bir yandan hiç durmadan yaz, tamam iyi kötü tanın, pek çok öykün yayımlansın ama sonra, ölümünden 11 yıl sonra, öykülerinin toplandığı kitap patlasın, dünyaca ünlen, hatta bu kitap türkçeye çevrilsin.
hayat bazen gerçekten çok acımasız ki ömrü boyunca skolyozla uğraşan, son on yılını omurgası akciğerini deldiği için oksijen tüpüyle geçiren lucia berlin’in şanstan yana pek nasiplenmediğini söylemek mümkün.
yazdığı öyküler farklı karakter isimleriyle devam etse bile belli bir bütünlük sağlıyor. bir biçimde iki kızkardeşin hayatını kitap boyunca farklı farklı öykülerden takip edebiliyoruz örneğin.
yine berlin oldukça cesur ve çıplak bir biçimde oto-kurmacayı 60’lı yıllardan itibaren keşfetmiş diyebiliriz çünkü ben size yaşamını google’lamadan öykülerden birleştirdiğim kadarıyla anlatabilirim mesela.
sık sık şunu düşündüm: yazarların renkli hayatı filan diye bir şey yok aslında. her hayat biricik ve belli bir yaşa kadar aile denen 💩 la çepeçevre kuşandığı için her hayat yazmaya değer. yazılacak kadar zengin. iş onu yazmakta.
lucia berlin de alkolik ve sevgisiz annesini, ilgili ama hep uzakta babasını anlatıyor uzun uzun. ama asıl trajedi bir dönem birlikte yaşadığı anneanne ve dedesinde. ilk öykülerde sempati duyduğumuz dede daha pek çok öyküde karşımıza çıkacak, yavaş yavaş kim olduğu açılarak.
ve tabii berlin’in ailesinin dışında gittiği rahibe okulları, devlet liseleri, ayrımcılık, yalnızlık da pek çok öyküde yer alıyor.
sonrası ise kendi çizdiği hayat: yepyeni trajediler. alkoliklik ki 4 çocuklu bir kadının bu işi nasıl becerdiği hem çok sert hem de komik bir biçimde anlatılıyor çoğu zaman.
yanlış sevgililer, yanlış kocalar, oğullar, ölümler, uyuşturucu, yanlış kararlar…
ömrünün son dönemlerinde hapishanelerde yaptığı yaratıcı yazı hocalığı ise bu kez amerikan rüyasını hapishanelerle taçlandırıyor.
carver ya da çehov’a benzetmişler lucia berlin’i… bense kadınlara dair yazdıkları, o hayatın zorluklarını yine de hep bir humor’la anlattığı için en çok grace paley’e benzettim. birine benzetmek şartsa… yoksa çok kendi şahsına münhasır.
öyküler sık sık meksika’ya da uğruyor. ve çok net görüyoruz yine: amerika berbat bir yer.
430 sayfalık bu kitabı aylin ülçer ustalıkla çevirmiş. bizi buluşturduğu için siren yayınlarına ❤️❤️❤️
hayat bazen gerçekten çok acımasız ki ömrü boyunca skolyozla uğraşan, son on yılını omurgası akciğerini deldiği için oksijen tüpüyle geçiren lucia berlin’in şanstan yana pek nasiplenmediğini söylemek mümkün.
yazdığı öyküler farklı karakter isimleriyle devam etse bile belli bir bütünlük sağlıyor. bir biçimde iki kızkardeşin hayatını kitap boyunca farklı farklı öykülerden takip edebiliyoruz örneğin.
yine berlin oldukça cesur ve çıplak bir biçimde oto-kurmacayı 60’lı yıllardan itibaren keşfetmiş diyebiliriz çünkü ben size yaşamını google’lamadan öykülerden birleştirdiğim kadarıyla anlatabilirim mesela.
sık sık şunu düşündüm: yazarların renkli hayatı filan diye bir şey yok aslında. her hayat biricik ve belli bir yaşa kadar aile denen 💩 la çepeçevre kuşandığı için her hayat yazmaya değer. yazılacak kadar zengin. iş onu yazmakta.
lucia berlin de alkolik ve sevgisiz annesini, ilgili ama hep uzakta babasını anlatıyor uzun uzun. ama asıl trajedi bir dönem birlikte yaşadığı anneanne ve dedesinde. ilk öykülerde sempati duyduğumuz dede daha pek çok öyküde karşımıza çıkacak, yavaş yavaş kim olduğu açılarak.
ve tabii berlin’in ailesinin dışında gittiği rahibe okulları, devlet liseleri, ayrımcılık, yalnızlık da pek çok öyküde yer alıyor.
sonrası ise kendi çizdiği hayat: yepyeni trajediler. alkoliklik ki 4 çocuklu bir kadının bu işi nasıl becerdiği hem çok sert hem de komik bir biçimde anlatılıyor çoğu zaman.
yanlış sevgililer, yanlış kocalar, oğullar, ölümler, uyuşturucu, yanlış kararlar…
ömrünün son dönemlerinde hapishanelerde yaptığı yaratıcı yazı hocalığı ise bu kez amerikan rüyasını hapishanelerle taçlandırıyor.
carver ya da çehov’a benzetmişler lucia berlin’i… bense kadınlara dair yazdıkları, o hayatın zorluklarını yine de hep bir humor’la anlattığı için en çok grace paley’e benzettim. birine benzetmek şartsa… yoksa çok kendi şahsına münhasır.
öyküler sık sık meksika’ya da uğruyor. ve çok net görüyoruz yine: amerika berbat bir yer.
430 sayfalık bu kitabı aylin ülçer ustalıkla çevirmiş. bizi buluşturduğu için siren yayınlarına ❤️❤️❤️
December 1, 2019
Od prve priče sam se zaljubio. Ništa bolje nego kada pristupiš knjizi sa visokim očekivanjima, a onda ih knjiga prevaziđe.
Uglavnom, preoblikovano životno viđenje u nizu od 43 priča. Posle nekih priča sam doslovno i spontano uzvikivao: „Pokidala je!”, „Razbila je!”. Bio sam uveren da prisustvujem uličnoj tuči iza neke kafane između života i Lusijine junakinje (mada, pošto su priče autobiografske, može se napisati i tuča između Lusije Berlin i života). U krajnjem rezultatu po nosu je uvek dobijala Lusija, ali je barem mogla da pobednički podigne ruku sa pramenom kose iščupanog od života ili da ispljune ugriz mesa uz širok kez, a onda da u sledećem trenutku padne strastveno u zagrljaj životu. U praksi, svakom svom junaku, ma koliko bio nepijatan, a neki su i užasni (recimo lik dede), Lusija Berlin je udelila po koju lepu reč.
U ovim pričama nema osuda i nema žrtava. Nisam siguran da li nema žrtava jer nema osuđivanja ili nema osuđivanja jer, kako jedna od njenih junakinja saopštava: „mrzim žrtve”. Naposletku, možda ni žrtve ni osuđivanje ne postoje kod Lusije nezavisno jedno od drugog. Njihovo uključivanje podrazumevalo bi neko isključivanje iz života, a Berlin, ne želi nikoga i ništa da isključi.
Uglavnom, preoblikovano životno viđenje u nizu od 43 priča. Posle nekih priča sam doslovno i spontano uzvikivao: „Pokidala je!”, „Razbila je!”. Bio sam uveren da prisustvujem uličnoj tuči iza neke kafane između života i Lusijine junakinje (mada, pošto su priče autobiografske, može se napisati i tuča između Lusije Berlin i života). U krajnjem rezultatu po nosu je uvek dobijala Lusija, ali je barem mogla da pobednički podigne ruku sa pramenom kose iščupanog od života ili da ispljune ugriz mesa uz širok kez, a onda da u sledećem trenutku padne strastveno u zagrljaj životu. U praksi, svakom svom junaku, ma koliko bio nepijatan, a neki su i užasni (recimo lik dede), Lusija Berlin je udelila po koju lepu reč.
U ovim pričama nema osuda i nema žrtava. Nisam siguran da li nema žrtava jer nema osuđivanja ili nema osuđivanja jer, kako jedna od njenih junakinja saopštava: „mrzim žrtve”. Naposletku, možda ni žrtve ni osuđivanje ne postoje kod Lusije nezavisno jedno od drugog. Njihovo uključivanje podrazumevalo bi neko isključivanje iz života, a Berlin, ne želi nikoga i ništa da isključi.
March 24, 2020
Confession: I'm not the greatest fan of short stories - I prefer the density of a novel - but these tales are just wonderful. Perhaps they work because, as others have said, there are continuities, not always obvious, between the characters and stories themselves so that we experience some of the connections of a novel. In any case, Berlin's cool, clean, pellucid prose wins hands down with me over that fussy, 'poetic' writing awash with strained images and metaphors that seems to be on all the prize lists.
Vivid and granular, these stories seem to exist naturally: there's no twist in the tale, no stunning revelation - and yet they reveal whole lives, whole characters in a handful of pages. Almost all Berlin's narrators are women - some are addicts and alcoholics but that doesn't reduce them to stereotypes; some are young women struggling with motherhood, with being daughters and wives; some are undocumented migrants; some work in hospitals, especially ERs.
There's a sly humour in these pages, that jostles up against disillusion and disappointment, and moments of incandescent joy. Ultimately, these are life-enhancing stories even when the ending is downbeat. For me, it has been best to spread these stories out rather than gulping them down too fast. Consistently unpredictable, surprising in the way that people are surprising, these avoid the spectacular but are quietly, realistically dazzling.
Vivid and granular, these stories seem to exist naturally: there's no twist in the tale, no stunning revelation - and yet they reveal whole lives, whole characters in a handful of pages. Almost all Berlin's narrators are women - some are addicts and alcoholics but that doesn't reduce them to stereotypes; some are young women struggling with motherhood, with being daughters and wives; some are undocumented migrants; some work in hospitals, especially ERs.
There's a sly humour in these pages, that jostles up against disillusion and disappointment, and moments of incandescent joy. Ultimately, these are life-enhancing stories even when the ending is downbeat. For me, it has been best to spread these stories out rather than gulping them down too fast. Consistently unpredictable, surprising in the way that people are surprising, these avoid the spectacular but are quietly, realistically dazzling.
February 12, 2018
When the New York Times Book Review names a book one of the 10 best of the year, I take note. And when I saw Lucia Berlin's book A Manual for Cleaning Women in one of my favorite Indy bookstores in the world, and that it was not only a NYT recommendation, but also had highly been recommended by a staff member at said bookstore, I instantly bought the book, so excited to start reading it. I love short stories! I love stories by women who have been ignored by history! Shoot, I love books! So it seemed like the perfect match.
And then I struggled.
And struggled.
For over a year and a half now this book has haunted my nightstand.
I have started reading it, and have by now gotten through about half of the stories. Slowly. Painfully.
I have dragged it along to Europe, taken it on long plane rides, had it by my side at all times, hoping that sooner or later I would actively want to read it.
But I haven't.
Instead, I have looked for anything else to read. I have let other books - over 50 other books- skip their place in line and all of those other books have been read, happily.
But this one just lingers.
I want to like Berlin's writing. I want to because so many people here on Goodreads seem to love her, seem to want to make her the unsung, overlooked hero.
But at some point yesterday I looked over, saw this book, and realized the only emotion it evoked was dread. Dread of having to read another story. And so I am quitting. I never quit. But this one has to go. I. Cannot. Finish. It.
What is it that's so hard about her writing?
I think it is this: her stories are bleak. Incredibly bleak.
And I am fine with bleak - can even love bleak at times - IF the writing itself is then one of beauty. But her writing is also uneventful, it drags, it lacks inherent beauty. And perhaps that is exactly what she is trying to do. But when you combine bleak writing with bleak stories, and underdeveloped sketches of characters who never reveal enough about themselves to become human, then reading just becomes an exercise in trying to attain a level of sadness and despondence and - I can't see the point of inflicting pain just for pain's sake.
And so, here it is. A book I gave up on. Sorry Lucia Berlin. I tried my best.
And then I struggled.
And struggled.
For over a year and a half now this book has haunted my nightstand.
I have started reading it, and have by now gotten through about half of the stories. Slowly. Painfully.
I have dragged it along to Europe, taken it on long plane rides, had it by my side at all times, hoping that sooner or later I would actively want to read it.
But I haven't.
Instead, I have looked for anything else to read. I have let other books - over 50 other books- skip their place in line and all of those other books have been read, happily.
But this one just lingers.
I want to like Berlin's writing. I want to because so many people here on Goodreads seem to love her, seem to want to make her the unsung, overlooked hero.
But at some point yesterday I looked over, saw this book, and realized the only emotion it evoked was dread. Dread of having to read another story. And so I am quitting. I never quit. But this one has to go. I. Cannot. Finish. It.
What is it that's so hard about her writing?
I think it is this: her stories are bleak. Incredibly bleak.
And I am fine with bleak - can even love bleak at times - IF the writing itself is then one of beauty. But her writing is also uneventful, it drags, it lacks inherent beauty. And perhaps that is exactly what she is trying to do. But when you combine bleak writing with bleak stories, and underdeveloped sketches of characters who never reveal enough about themselves to become human, then reading just becomes an exercise in trying to attain a level of sadness and despondence and - I can't see the point of inflicting pain just for pain's sake.
And so, here it is. A book I gave up on. Sorry Lucia Berlin. I tried my best.
November 11, 2020
Added Note: A vigorous discussion at the Breakfast Club prompted me to go and read this story a second time. I have upgraded my rating from a four to a five and I urge everyone to go and read this carefully. It might be the most brilliant modern short story out there.
This is a review of the title story only. No entry on Goodreads for it as an individual story. I would like to read this entire collection.
I love this kind of short story that seems to be about something simple, a cleaning lady and the jobs she has, but that succeeds in revealing something basic about humanity. In a few lines, Lucia Berlin tells us everything essential to know about the families our cleaning lady cleans for, and with almost as much brevity, we learn what our cleaning lady herself is up against in her personal life. The story is revealed to us through our nameless cleaner while she rides her bus from job to job and observes the people on the bus, the city outside the bus, and the internal conversation she has with herself. Well worth the read.
Read the Story Here
This is a review of the title story only. No entry on Goodreads for it as an individual story. I would like to read this entire collection.
I love this kind of short story that seems to be about something simple, a cleaning lady and the jobs she has, but that succeeds in revealing something basic about humanity. In a few lines, Lucia Berlin tells us everything essential to know about the families our cleaning lady cleans for, and with almost as much brevity, we learn what our cleaning lady herself is up against in her personal life. The story is revealed to us through our nameless cleaner while she rides her bus from job to job and observes the people on the bus, the city outside the bus, and the internal conversation she has with herself. Well worth the read.
Read the Story Here
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