She was born in Alaska in 1936, grew up in mining towns throughout the West, moved to Chile as a teenager, and lived in Mexico City and across America as an adult, writing intermittently and supporting herself by doing everything from nursing to housecleaning to teaching. The themes and experiences in her fiction roughly mirror the autobiographical contour of Berlin’s life. Many of the same characters recur in different stories, which gives the collection the feeling of an archeological site, with shards and scraps of a single larger story scattered across shorter narratives. Young girls slouch, “blowing smoke from their nostrils like petulant dragons.” The sound of teeth being pulled is like “trees being torn from winter ground.” Often the imagery is marvelously surprising and precise a woman scuba diving, for instance, describes the water like this: “Near the bottom it is warm, sunny, a Montana meadow years ago.”
Berlin is a master of evocative phrases that conjure the sensory world. The result is a fictional world of wide-ranging impact, a powerful chiaroscuro that manages to encompass the full spectrum of human experience.Įvery story displays similarly polished craftsmanship. The comic moments, in turn, shade into deep poignancy.
The bleakness of some of her subjects - alcoholism, suicide, sickness - belies her wonderful gift for coaxing humor from the most improbable material. The episode encapsulates the experience of reading Berlin’s stories, which alternate between light and dark so seamlessly and suddenly that a certain emotion barely fades before you feel something abruptly different. “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. An instant later, two cats pounce forward and begin “chomping away on birds, feathers flying.” The man staying in her guest cottage looks out at the scene, sees her smiling, and thinks that the woman is delighted by the carnage. One moment, a woman is smiling and sipping her morning coffee, watching as finches and doves eat the seeds she has tossed onto her deck. ‘Stars and Saints,’’ an early story in Lucia Berlin’s beautiful posthumous collection, “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” opens with an idyllic scene that quickly turns violent. Short-story writer Lucia Berlin died in 2004.
0 kommentar(er)
