A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

As Elizabeth Geoghegan put it so beautifully in her piece in The Paris Review, it’s the voice that pulls you in."A Manual For Cleaning Women" is brilliant, one-of-a-kind, memorable, compelling and all of that.Geohegan: “The moves she makes in her fiction shadow the peripatetic nature of intimate conversation, and in turn, her peripatetic life. She can transport you from the alcoholics of El Paso to the inmates of Oakland as easily as she can make you believe she was capable of loading a lethal dose into her addict husband’s syringe before going to the hospital to deliver his child. Each of her stories unfolds in such unexpected ways you nearly forget where the tale has begun. Then she suddenly brings you back and knocks the wind out of you with one of her singular last lines.”Read the opening foreword by Lydia Davis, and you’ll have no choice but to dive into the stories and then, well, you’re hooked with that voice, especially after you reach the wickedly funny title story (the fourth).Lydia Davis: “Lucia Berlin’s stories are electric, they buzz and crackle as the live wires touch. And in response, the reader’s mind, too, beguiled, enraptured, comes alive, all synapses firing. This is the way we like to be, when we’re reading—using our brains, feeling our hearts beat.”And that’s precisely the feeling you get.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.”The comparisons are out there—Carver, Proust, Chekhov, Proulx. All legit. (Skip right to “Point of View” as Berlin invokes Chekhov and basically tells us how she uses “intricate detail” to make a character “believable.” This is a short story about writing; her secrets.)Berlin’s style is blunt, gritty, unflinching, non-flashy, earnest, detailed, matter-of-fact. There’s a medical undertow to the entire collection—dentists, abortionists, hospitals, nurses. Blood is a frequent topic along with other bodily fluids. Berlin’s writing is un-sanitized, too, but it’s frequently as straightforward as a friend with, well, a story.“I’ve worked in hospitals for years now and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that the sicker the patients are the less noise they make,” goes the first line of “Temps Perdu.” How easy and inviting is that?“It was dry at the airport, cars grinding in and out on the gravel,” says the narrator in “Electric Car, El Paso,” a funny four-page dollop. “Tumbleweeds caught in the fence. Asphalt, metal, a haze of dusty dancing atoms that reflected dazzling from the wings and windows of the airplanes. People in cars around us were eating sloppy things. Watermelons, pomegranates, bruised bananas.”The stories often feature people who try new things, step into other worlds, and stretch their boundaries. Her characters are not fodder for the fates, however. They make choices. No matter the narrator or main character, the senses are always on fire, taking in the world.In “Bluebonnets,” one of the few stories told in third person, a teacher named Maria heads off from Oakland to Texas to spend time with a writer whose work she had translated into Spanish. A fling of sorts; she’s not sure. The man, Dixon, stops on their drive out into the country and makes her wait while he gets a haircut. “The absence of noise was what was so evocative of her childhood, of another era. No sirens, no traffic, no radios. A horsefly buzzed against the window, snip of scissors, the rhythm of the two men’s voices, an electric fan with dirty ribbons flying rustled old magazines. The barber ignored her, not out of rudeness but from courtesy.”She’s a reporter (or memoirist) who takes stark, unsentimental moments and finds the telling image that reveals how her characters feel, what they’re thinking. Reading these stories, you get the feeling that Berlin never had her brain turned off or her eyes closed. Berlin is utterly alive, despite all the poverty-stricken bleakness or alcoholism or death, and her characters are, too. They see things, hear things, and document their surroundings as they confront some terribly real scenario.In “Todo Luna, Todo Año,” a Spanish teacher named Eloise Gore takes her solo trip three years after the death of her husband. Eloise is about to wake up, in a very big way, but first she takes in her surroundings, feeling very much out of place.“She forced herself to relax, to enjoy langostinos broiled in garlic. Mariachis were strolling from table to table, passed hers by when they saw her frozen expression. Sabor a ti. The taste of you. Imagine an American song about how somebody tasted? Everything in Mexico tasted. Vivid garlic, cilantro, lime. The smells were vivid. Not the flowers, they didn’t smell at all. But the sea, the pleasant smell of decaying jungle. Rancid odor of the pigskin chairs, kerosene-waxed tiles, candles.”Later, in her room, Eloise works working on translating a poem. Berlin tumbles together her fine-tuning of the translation with all that is going on around her. And the two strands intertwine, exterior and interior.“In her room she looked at the poem again. Thus all life arrives / at the place of its quietude. No. And not life, anyway, the word is sangre, blood, all that pulsates and flows. The lamp was too dim, bugs clattered into the shade. As she shut off her light the music began again in the bar. Insistent thud of the bass. Her heart beat, was beating. Sangre.”Lucia Berlin stories pulsate and flow, yes, with 'sangre' and heart.

Lucia Berlin, while apparently not all that well known in literary circles, has authored several powerful collections of short stories (most recently this volume and Evening in Paradise) as well as a memoir Welcome Home. During her emotionally packed life she was married three times, raised four children virtually alone, and lived in an assorted collection of places including Arizona, Mexico, Chile, New York and Colorado. She worked in a wide variety of jobs including office manager, medical assistant, cleaning lady, and university professor. She was plagued with scoliosis her whole life and was an alcoholic for much of it. Her husbands and partners often suffered with drug abuse. She was often forced to live a hand-to-mouth existence. Despite all this, she was a writer of remarkable sensitivity. Her stories often appear to be fictionalized versions of actual events in her life. And they are often stark and poignant renditions of things she lived through. I found that in this volume, after a slightly slow start, the stories became really gripping and intense and left this reader moved by the sensitivity and emotions depicted. Toward the end of her life, Lucia was invited to the University of Colorado to teach creative writing and was praised as an exceptional teacher. A fitting conclusion to a rather sensational life by a gifted writer.

I am sad it took me so long to get to Lucia Berlin, but am so thankful that I have read this outstanding, wildass, vibrant writer!!! DAMN! I picked it up and couldn't put it down. These stories have the same central characters throughout taken from four separate collections. I am in LOVE with the narrator of all of these! After her death her son wrote: "Ma wrote true stories, not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes."The stories are set in Mexico, New Mexico, New York, Arizona, Texas, and Colorado. Berlin had so many different jobs and lived in small towns and large cities and she's brings ALL to LIFE with her mastery of language and internal, external dialogue. Both hilarious and heartbreaking, she delves deep through her characters and takes us in as an astute outsider who sees the unjust world with humor and pathos. Here are some quotes, but the entire collection is quotable:"shutters as old as Herman Melville.""He began to pull the rest of his bottom teeth without a mirror. The sound was the sound of roots being ripped out, like trees being torn from winter ground.""I would lurch up to them and blurt out "My uncle has a glass eye." Or "I found a dead Kodiak bear with his face full of maggots.""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.....Today I stole a bottle of Spice Islands sesame seeds.""You'll feel, hell if the narrator thinks there is something in this dreary creature worth writing about there must be. I'll read on and see what happens. Nothing happens, actually. In fact the story isn't even written yet. What I hope to do is, by the use of intricate detail, to make this woman so believable you can't help but feel for her.""The day my father killed off my mother was the day he stopped knowing me.""I've never understood how so many barely literate people read the Bible so much. It's hard. In the same way it surprises me that uneducated seamstresses all over the world can figure out how to put in sleeves and zippers."I am enamored! I look forward to reading all of her collections! Get it!

Boring and tedious short stories.

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. Consistently unpredictable, surprising in the way that people are surprising, these avoid the spectacular but are quietly, realistically dazzling.

This is a difficult collection to rate. A small portion of these stories are pure genius whereas others are just plain bizarre with no purpose.This was a collection that was constructed after Berlin's death and collects stories written at various stages of Berlin's life. It is clear that Berlin's life heavily influences her stories and you can learn a lot about her from her stories: alcoholism, cancer, multiple marriages and a love of the South and of Mexico.Whilst many of these stories are enlightening of a world of women I often do not see, many of the stories contained the same characters in slightly different situations or the same story written in a different way with a slightly different ending.This book is a hard slog, so only start reading if you are prepared to stick to it!

This is a posthumous collection of short stories from a newly-rediscovered gem of a writer, Lucia Berlin. Her stories are honest and true, crafted with a gritty fearlessness that gets to the heart of the matter, whether it is about the deadened feelings of an ER nurse, an alcoholic mother struggling to make it to a liquor store across town and back before her sons wake up at dawn, confronting the contrary emotions toward a cancer-stricken sister in need of her, or narrating a short but startling episode of child abuse. What is amazing in these pieces of autofiction (if you like) is the unflinching manner in which Berlin tells her often bleak tales without the usual melodrama, that makes them all the more powerful.There are comic moments too, which are cast with the same unflinching honesty, as in “Stars and Saints”, where the narrator, hoping to make a good impression on handsome neighbour, does just the opposite when a pastoral scene of birds flocking down to feed on birdseed she had strewn on her deck goes terribly wrong: “There was no way I could explain that it had all happened so fast, that I wasn’t smiling away at the cats chewing the birds. it was that my happiness about the sweet peas and the finches hadn’t had time to fade”.Many of these stories are set in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and several parts of America, mirroring the trajectory of her own nomadic life with characters that share her varied job titles, many of them working class jobs featured in many of these stories. She has a sharp writerly gaze that inhabits these often interlinked stories featuring recurring characters and circumstances, and some where she takes on the perspective of another character, such as the felon in her prison writing class. It is never explicit that these pieces are strictly autobiographical (as is the writer’s prerogative) but they always speak with an authentic voice.The most poignant story from the generous selection of over 40 for me was “Mijito”, a dual-voiced narrative from the perspectives of a teenaged Mexican mom with her sick baby and an ER nurse in an Oakland Hospital. Within about 20 pages, Berlin has traced the tragic decline of the hapless teen, the contrast with the nurse’s methodical reporting and frustration at the lack of cooperation from the teen mom made even more striking for showing how they came from different worlds. The ending still haunts me. If anything, Berlin is the queen of endings - the last lines of the many of these stories hit out at the reader, with a sudden revelation, a turn in the tone of the overall story, or a promise of more that lingers beyond the confines of that piece.

When a book takes 40 pages before the beginning to advertise how well-written it is and how insightful the author is, I am left thinking someone doth protest too much. My book club recommends giving a book "one hundred pages". I just couldn't do it.

I was wary of approaching this much-hyped collection, published 3 yrs ago - but she's a brilliant writer. Her stories have the rawness and power of Denis Johnson, with whom she shares some of the grim, addicted characterisation and incidents arising from the lives of addicts, plus the gritty realist style of Raymond Carver. But the stories are shot through with a breezy lyricism and, oddly enough, cheerfulness and humour that's largely absent in those two iconic 'dirty realists'. Highly recommended.