This is a collection of 43 stories by Lucia Berlin (1936-2004), who published some 76 stories altogether, but reached a comparatively small readership during her lifetime. This edition, published in 2015 but containing stories variously copyrighted from 1977 to 1999, is the one that finally won Berlin a wide audience.

I can't quite remember where I first heard about her, but then suddenly she was everywhere (including in Elena Ferrante's list of 40 favourite books by female authors). Trouble was, I hadn't been able to score a good-value copy -- until I spotted that this was a title held by Douglas Library (which I esteem more and more).

Now, I'm not a huge fan of short stories. I know I've said this before, and I know it's almost always the preface to revealing an exception... And there have been lots of exceptions lately (James Joyce's Dubliners; E.F. Benson's Ghost Stories; that little group of scary stories by Jacobs, Gilman, Bowen, and Link; England, My England by D.H. Lawrence...)

Nevertheless, the statement still stands: I'm not a huge fan of short stories. So much investment in getting to know a scenario and a set of characters, only for the whole thing to peter out after a few pages. At least give me a novella...

If you think such a stance is pretty silly, and steers me away from lots of good literature, then I have to admit you're right. I even have a little project on the go, which is aimed at curing myself of just this prejudice. But the medicine hasn't taken yet, and so, there we are: I'm still not a huge fan of short stories.

But -- and here it comes, that "but" again... Berlin's stories are fabulous. They're so direct, so intimate, that you can't stop yourself warming to them. Throughout, you have the impression that you're hanging out with the kind of slightly older confidante who's been round the block a few times, and can tell you a thing or two.



All life is there: The abusive grandfather; the enigmatic, tragic, but resolutely cruel mother; the troublesome pupil; the scuba-dive master who's a serial seducer; the parents who are just that bit too protective; the alcoholics and other addicts, with their various degrees of ability to cope; the young women, often put into impossible positions...

Increasingly, the stories involve Sally, the narrator's sister, who's dying of cancer. Grief, the title of one of my favourites, shows us the two sisters through the eyes of other guests at the resort where they're recuperating after losing their mother. The one with cancer needs support -- and gets it. The other REALLY needs support (she's a budding alcoholic, and has just lost her job), but she spends her time propping up the cancer victim.

In all, it's a vivid array of all too believable characters.


Lucia Berlin

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There's one thing I hate about short-story compilations like this one: The annoying practice of taking the title of one of the stories, and making it stand in for the whole anthology.

A Manual for Cleaning Women is one of the stories. And it's brilliant -- just little episodes chronicling this woman's various bus routes and quirky clients, and her handy hints for actual cleaning women (eg: "Never make friends with cats, don’t let them play with the mop, the rags. The ladies will get jealous").

Joanne O'Leary points out that this story "is also a forest of signs -- the literary equivalent of a hyper-realist painting of a shop window by Richard Estes -- with bus destinations, slogans and notices printed in caps: BLIND, SUICIDE PREVENTION, MAGIC WAND BEAUTY PARLOUR. It seems like the shabby territory of a Coen Brothers film, Fargo perhaps -- exposing everything that is overwhelming and broken about late capitalism, the way it dwarfs the little people; the cleaners and the drunks, the street people. The narrator is a cleaning woman, she has four sons and her husband is dead. She is 'educated' but this is the only work she can get. It is a story that is packed with truth, filled with small facts that illuminate the lives of those caught on the lowest margins. One man she cleans house for asks why she 'chose this particular line or work.' An idiotic question because at that level of need for employment no choice is involved..." It's a kind of magic. All these little details come together to create something very moving.

But this story doesn't represent the others, most of which AREN'T about cleaning women. Hence my complaint.

I also concur with the beef Joyce Carol Oates expresses about the "indeterminate order -- it isn’t clear if the editor’s principle of organization is chronological, or thematic; indeed, if there is any principle of organization at all. In his breezy introduction Stephen Emerson remarks that Berlin’s short, sketchy story B.F. and Me is the last story she wrote, but it is not the last story in the collection."


Yogyakarta, 2012. There's no denying that these stories feature women first and foremost, and many of the scenarios highlight the kinds of things that affect women everywhere

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There are way too many stories to go into each one individually. What follows, then, is by way of an overview.

What's to like?

1.

Berlin observes REALLY well. Oddball characters, objects, sounds, dialogue -- it all leaps off the page. This is partly because a lot of what she describes is based on her own experience. She led a fascinating life: She moved around a lot in her youth because of her father's job in the mining industry; stayed with her grandparents in El Paso (along with her mother and sister) during the war, when her father went off to fight; moved to Chile after the war, where she became fluent in Spanish; studied at the University of New Mexico; married and divorced three times before her early thirties, while spending chunks of time in Mexico in the process; and worked a range of jobs -- teaching, cleaning, nursing, operating a telephone switchboard -- to support her four sons. She successfully battled alcoholism, and lived most of her life with scoliosis (this eventually led to lung damage, necessitating the permanent use of an oxygen tank).

You can tell that Berlin knows what she's talking about. Joanne O'Leary records this quote: "'Everything I write is autobiographical,' she said in 1990. 'I don’t know why I have my name in some stories and not in others. Come to think of it I don’t know why I don't have my name in all of them. I can’t imagine what effect this has upon readers... I hope they feel that the story is true.'" Oh, we do, we do...

But while they're autobiographical, they're not straight autobiography. As Lydia Davis records in the Foreword of the edition I read: "One of her sons said, after her death, 'Ma wrote true stories, not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes.'"

It's what the French call auto-fiction: "Her son went on to say, '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.'"


Nyaungshwe, Myanmar, 2012

2.

The slight divergence of detail -- giving us the feeling we're dealing with a reflection rather than an actual image -- both shifts the stories from straight memoir, and gives them depth. So, as we read, we find that certain characters and situations recur (building our knowledge in a very organic and true-to-life kind of way). Chris Power asks: "What does it mean that even when the narrators’ names change (Lucia, Dolores, Claudia), the other details of their lives mostly stay the same? The abusive grandfather, the cruel mother, well-meaning but chaotic Uncle John, the bombshell cousin Bella Lynn, and most memorably of all Sally, the younger sister who is dying of cancer in Mexico City. In several stories... the final months of Sally’s life are recounted in a variety of ways."

Power's answer is this: "I think what Berlin is doing here has something to do with a way of thinking about life and literature that also preoccupied David Foster Wallace. Wallace often expressed the view that life is too profuse for fiction to adequately capture it. The narrator of his story Good Old Neon puts forward the most extreme version of this belief, complaining that even a small portion of our internal thought process 'is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant'. Berlin seems to shares this view, that individual narratives aren't sufficient to capture certain episodes in life. As the narrator of Silence says of a piece of family lore: 'I know it is true that Grandpa shot him, but how it happened has about 10 different versions'. It isn’t just that different people have different accounts of the same event: our memories can be plastic, contradictory, vulnerable to reinterpretation. In the case of Sally’s death, each time Berlin returns to it the angles are different, the focus has shifted, and yet the characters become more indelible. This isn’t repetition, but a process of ongoing definition."



3.

Alcoholism is a recurring theme, and it's very deftly and sympathetically handled. The most complex and haunting of the alcoholics portrayed is the mother figure -- the mother of Sally and the narrator. Berlin's mother was indeed an alcoholic, and it seems clear that much of the maternal portrait is drawn from Berlin's experience.

The sisters in the narratives find it hard to shake off the hold their mother had over them, even now she's dead. She hated Mexicans; she hated the word love ("she said it the way people say the word SLUT"); and she hated children ("whatever you do, don't breed," she told Sally, and when the narrator brought her four little kids to meet her at an airport, "she yelled 'Call them off!' as if they were a pack of Dobermans"). Now she is dead, the sisters try to rehabilitate her in their memory, with only partial success. But they understand, too, that she didn't have an easy life. Her own parents lost their fortune in the Depression, and the narrator concludes: "Everything was grim. And scary probably, if Grandpa did to her what he did to both Sally and me. She never said anything about it, but he must have, since she hated him so much, would never let anybody touch her, not even shake hands."

4.

Because the stories stretch over a number of years, we feel privileged to see the narrator age. Like many of us, she grows more bewildered by the way life works out, and more introspective and retrospective. So Long features a character called Max. The narrator was married to him, but his heroin addiction made life a rollercoaster, and they divorced. Yet she's close to him again now. "So what is marriage anyway?" she ponders. "I never figured it out. And now it is death I don't understand. Not just Sally's death. My country, after Rodney King [1991] and the riots. All over the world, the rage and despair."

In the story Homing, the narrator watches the crows returning to their tree, really taking notice of them for the first time. The last couple of stories have shown her dependence on an oxygen tank. She can't walk far. It's coincidence she found out about the crows, so she wonders: "What else have I missed?" But it's pointless to ask. Shut the door on grief, regret, remorse, she counsels. If you let them in even a bit, they'll wreck the place...

Power reflects: "The final story Berlin wrote, BF and Me, about an old woman in a trailer home tethered to an oxygen tank, trying to get a tiler -- at least as old, and almost as emphysemic -- to renovate her bathroom, provides a fittingly unsentimental conclusion to her work."



5.

She does cracking final sentences...

The story entitled Dr H.A. Moynihan features the recurring grandfather. He's a dentist by trade, and in this account, he pulls out his own teeth, with his young granddaughter's help. It's horrendous, and I ended up feeling quite sick. But at the end, the younger version of herself that the narrator is recalling can't help but feel sorry for her bloodied grandfather, and presses her mother: "You don’t still hate him, do you Mama?" To which her mother replies, "Oh, yes. Yes I do."

Power again: "Berlin instinctively recoils from moments that threaten sentimentality." Too right... In the story called Mama, which is very dark, the narrator is trying, with some success, to persuade Sally to think better of their mother. Sally ends up agreeing that it's important to empathize. But then the last line crashes in: "Me... I have no mercy."

In the story Silence, Uncle John, inebriated, hits a child and a dog with his truck, and does not stop. The story concludes, laconically: "Of course by this time I had realised all the reasons why he couldn’t stop the truck, because by this time I was an alcoholic."



6.

Berlin, as we saw, spent plenty of time in Chile and in Mexico. Her descriptions are down-to-earth, but evocative:

In Tiger Bites, where a young woman travels to Juarez for an abortion that she ultimately doesn't go through with, we're told: "We came to the bridge and the smell of Mexico. Smoke and chili and beer. Carnations and candles and kerosene. Oranges and Delicados and urine. I buzzed the window down and hung my head out, glad to be home. Church bells, ranchera music, bebop jazz, mambos. Christmas carols from the tourist shops. Rattling exhaust pipes, honkings, drunken American soldiers from Fort Bliss. El Paso matrons, serious shoppers, carrying pinatas and jugs of rum."

They're sometimes funny, too. Fool To Cry opens like this: "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."

Panteon del Dolores is very dark (and very reminiscent of Under the Volcano. It begins: "Not 'Heavenly Rest' or 'Serene Valley'. Pantheon of Pain is the name of the cemetery at Chapultepec Park. You can't get away from it in Mexico. Death. Blood. Pain."

And before we start thinking, oh, maybe that's a bit stereotypical, bear in mind that this collection of short stories has been translated into more than 20 languages, "and has been received with particular enthusiasm in Spain and Latin America".

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All in all, a great reading experience. What a talent.