A Manual for Cleaning Women is a short-story collection from an author who never received the attention she deserved during her lifetime. (Berlin died in 2004.) Her stories are usually founded on autobiographical elements, so it's good that she lived a colorful life: raised in mining camps in the US and in Latin America, suffering from scoliosis and alcoholism, rearing four kids from three marriages, working in schools, hospitals, and as a cleaning woman.
It's probably the autobiography that makes her stories feel more palpable and authentic than most literary fiction, even fiction that takes place in similar low-rent circumstances. The connections between the stories become more prominent in the second half of the book, where multiple stories share the same characters and feature variations on events from the first half. These connections allow the stories to expand on each other, but at the expense of their strength as stand-alone stories. By the end, A Manual for Cleaning Women started to feel like a fragmentary memoir.
It's probably the autobiography that makes her stories feel more palpable and authentic than most literary fiction, even fiction that takes place in similar low-rent circumstances. The connections between the stories become more prominent in the second half of the book, where multiple stories share the same characters and feature variations on events from the first half. These connections allow the stories to expand on each other, but at the expense of their strength as stand-alone stories. By the end, A Manual for Cleaning Women started to feel like a fragmentary memoir.
No comments:
Post a Comment