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"Stories from a lost American classic "in the same arena as Alice Munro" (Lydia Davis) "In the field of short fiction, Lucia Berlin is one of America's best kept secrets. That's it. Flat out. No mitigating conditions." --Paul Metcalf A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With her trademark blend of humor and melancholy, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday--uncovering moments of grace in the cafeterias and Laundromats of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Northern California upper classes, and from the perspective of a cleaning woman alone in a hotel dining room in Mexico City. The women of Berlin's stories are lost, but they are also strong, clever, and extraordinarily real. They are hitchhikers, hard workers, bad Christians. With the wit of Lorrie Moore and the grit of Raymond Carver, they navigate a world of jockeys, doctors, and switchboard operators. They laugh, they mourn, they drink. Berlin, a highly influential writer despite having published little in her lifetime, conjures these women from California, Mexico, and beyond. Lovers of the short story will not want to miss this remarkable collection from a master of the form"--… (more)
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Every once in awhile, you stumble on a book, that just reminds you, why books are special, why you have devoted endless minutes, hours and days, to the
Many of these tales, are based on Berlin's life, gently linked stories, that show women, struggling to make ends meet, working as cleaning women, nurses and switchboard operators. The difficulties of being a single mother, dealing with alcohol and drugs and in the later stories, dreams and mortality.
Obviously what makes all this work, is her writing craft, which makes all this come alive, with humor, intelligence, passion and beauty.
Many readers, are not “short story” fans. Give this one a try: it might just open a door...a very big door.
1. Start at the back with “A Note on Lucia Berlin”, which is her life history and hints at the variation in subjects.
2. Read “Silence”, a story about a dark part of her youth, enveloped by an alcoholic mother and
3. Read the Forward, where I learned many stories are ‘auto-fiction’, i.e. autobiographical fiction or dramatized self-truth.
4. Read the Introduction, which gives you precise examples of what’s to come.
5. Read the rest of the book.
My review:
I struggled reading this book, putting it down and even back into the bookcase at least four times. But I’m stubborn and eventually got through it.
There are forty-three short stories in this book. 43 in just under 400 pages! For much of it, the stories read like brain puke, as though she has a sudden recollection of a past and hurriedly wrote it down. The sentences are often incompletely. The words can come across as choppy. If she did that purposefully to reflect the randomness of an alcoholic mind, it’s pure genius. If not, it’s crappy writing, and it was a pain to follow these stories which are presented not in chronological order, not separated by location, not grouped by relation (especially her sister Sally who appeared in multiple stories), and not by the same ‘I’. The ‘I’ is not always Lucia. Sometimes it switches to a ‘he’ (“Let Me See You Smile”). Within the same story, time can hop back and forth (“Fool to Cry”), and the ‘I’ can change person (“Mijito”) all without any indicator. Gawd, I hate her dangling pronouns! This book needs some re-ordering and remove a few stories that are dead weight.
Struggling through all that, there are stories that read as though they came from her soul.
“Silence” is named after a period of her youth where she stopped speaking, including at school. Physical and mental abuse from her mother and sexual abuse from her grandfather filled these dark pages, with brief reprieves from a neighbor friend and Uncle John. Her statement of becoming an alcoholic at the end of this story suggest the events here was an instigator.
“Here It Is Saturday” speaks of a writing class in jail. The story flowed particularly well, and the ending was a jolt, in a sad but good way.
“A Manual for Cleaning Women” is touching and yet aching.
“Angel’s Laundromat” is a sweet story about friendship with an Indian (i.e. Native American). Even then, death is implied.
“Dr. H. A. Moynihan” is likely noted as humorous by reviewers, but I just found it gross with young Lucia helping her grandfather with his dentures.
“502” is one of the few that made me smile where 4 old drunks got some free money.
Moments of humor punctuate many of these stories, but overall, to me anywhere, I found the sadness outweighed the humor via alcoholism, racism, death, grief, child abuse, cancer, helpless mothers, harms of gossip, and much more. This is not a book I would readily recommend.
I can see why, in the Forward, Lydia Davis kept quoting little nuggets from the stories. They are full of these perfect simple statements. Here is a favorite:
"Were we a nice family? I didn't know. What I still do is look in picture windows where families are sitting around and wonder what they do, how do they talk to one another?"
And, from "Homing," the final story:
"I have never seen the crows leave the tree in the morning but every evening about a half an hour before dark, they start flying in from all over town. There may be regular herders who swoop around in the sky for blocks calling for the others to come home, or perhaps each one circles around gathering stragglers before it pops into the tree. I've watched enough, you'd think I could tell by now. But I only see crows, dozens of crows, flying in from every direction from far away and five or six circling like over O'Hare, calling calling, and then in a split second suddenly it is silent and no crows are to be seen. The tree looks like an ordinary maple tree. No way you'd know there were so many birds in there."
Who hasn't witnessed this very phenomenon? And Berlin describes it so perfectly, with amusement and wonder and absolute accuracy.
I had many favorite stories among the collection but here is an example of the vast territory of Berlin's writing. Near the end of the collection, "Mijito" broke my heart in a way only the best literature can; I ached as I finished that story. The very next story, "502," was funny and delightful and charming; it left me cheering for its ragtag collection of characters (despite its ominous last sentence).
Highly recommended.
Amazon: ""I have always had faith that the best writers will rise to the top, like cream, sooner or later, and
A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the Laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians.
Readers will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they'd ever overlooked her in the first place."
One thing that surprised me here was not the vivid content of the stories or their frank presentations of alcoholism or sexual wandering. Rather it was the near absence of the act of writing, the process, the hours and hours that Berlin, as a real person, must have spent developing and honing her craft. That must have been a major component in her life and yet here it is nearly invisible. For someone touted as a great realist writer who famously draws on her own experience and presents it seemingly unfiltered, this seems curious. I can only assume it is deliberate artistic choice. (Because I doubt she found writing to be more shameful than some of the things she did under the malign influence of alcohol.) My question is what does that choice reveal?
I’m glad I read this collection and got a chance encounter some of Berlin’s writing. I just don’t think I’ll confuse that with having met her. I think there is more here than what appears on the surface. Which is probably no surprise.
Recommended.
This is a collection of 43 stories, all populated with broken characters. Many are clearly half-autobiographical and several are about the same recurring characters. Even those that are not obviously linked in this way are very similar in theme and tone. The stories are raw, dealing with alcoholism, drug addiction, cancer, death, despair, and loneliness. Berlin doesn't write happy. She writes about the disadvantaged, the poor, the overworked, and the floundering. The stories are straightforward and clearly personal. Having so many under one cover highlights the repetition though. They are well written but perhaps a more careful curation would have prevented the fatigue that set in as I pushed further into the book. Short story readers will likely appreciate these as the neglected gems that so many reviewers have labelled them, I just reached a saturation point before I finished (and I did in fact finish).
"So what is marriage anyway? I never figured it out. And now it is death i don't understand. My country after Rodney King and the riots. All over the world, rage and despair."
Hmm … Still pretty relevant, huh? And there are several stories here about death, as her narrator sits with her younger sister, who is dying slowly and painfully of cancer, in Mexico City. The sisters become closer, remembering their horrible childhoods, neglected by their alcoholic mother, molested by their grandfather. Their mother, who attempted suicide a couple times, always leaving the narrator notes, one signed Bloody Mary, another said, "No noose … couldn't get the hang of it." See? Very dark humor, perhaps inherited.
There is another hilarious story about Lu's friendship with four old winos who sit in a junked Corvair and drink all day. And how Lu is NOT arrested for DWI, because her car was empty when it hit their junker. Sorry, you have to READ the story. It's funny! And there are heartbreaking stories here too, like the teenage mother illegal immigrant and her baby in "Mijito."
There are a lot of stories here, every one a gem. When FS&G collected all these stories from earlier small press editions, the book became a bestseller and the New York Times picked it as one of the 10 best books of 2015. My hat is off to that book's editor and collaborators. Because I loved this book. My highest recommendation. R.I.P., Lucia. You MATTERED! You were a WRITER!
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
Lucia Berlin’s stories were compiled after her death in the book A Manual for Cleaning Women. They are fictional but autobiographical too. They deal a lot with the places she lived (Idaho, AZ, Chile, TX, CA, CO) and her life’s struggle with alcoholism, her sister’s cancer, her abusive mother and her many stints in blue collar jobs.
I wish the book was about half the length and either organized by topic or place rather than random stories, I.e all the short stories with her sister Sally in one section, her CA stories in another. That may have made it easier for me to want to keep reading.
Although it sounds very depressing, there are some stories and language filled with hope and love and lots of beauty in nature. It was a good book for book club discussion. Plus, with short stories you don’t have to worry about spoilers as much when some people have only read a few stories.
to be that but have different character names and some are total fiction. They were fascinating. Someone in a review said to first read “a note on Lucia Berlin”, then read the short story “Silence” and then the rest
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They are also taken from the author's live, so we meet the same characters sometimes at different stages of their lives, from different points of view. It makes for an interesting reading like looking at lives in a mosaic of jigsaw puzzle form.
Lucia Berlin's writing is literary without being pretentious. Here the quirky humor, the inventive imagery and new turns of phrase trump the heavy literary prose that plagues most award-wining writing. She is a literary writer for the people, embracing their problems, their body odor, their embarrassing failings in the face of addiction, sickness, infidelity and death. One can feel her empathy and generosity of spirit throughout her narratives.
This book is sometimes heavy, sometimes funny but always profoundly relevant. It is worth putting on your bookshelf to dive into and re-read repeatedly.