Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Lucia Berlin, Evening in Paradise ****

 Evening in Paradise offers "more stories" from the author of the surprise bestseller Manual for Cleaning Women. Like the earlier collection, Evening in Paradise features quiet stories with clear autobiographical elements. Most of them take place in the southwest or Latin America, with young women carving out a meaningful life with men (miners and musicians) who appear to give them little thought. They take a more personal approach to conventional short-story situations; for example, the story about a bullfight ("Sombra") is more about the people she meets than about the "elegance and brutality" of the sport.

I find Berlin's stories immersive and often moving. Her writing feels casual and rarely draws attention to itself, as if she were a neighbor telling you an anecdote whose well-defined structure isn't obvious until the end.

The book doesn't provide any indication of when the stories were first published. Some of the later stories (running from "The Wives" to "Rainy Day") feel more contrived and self-consciously literary. If we assume the stories are in roughly chronological order, I don't care for this period of Berlin's career.

There are things people just don't talk about. I don’t mean the hard things, like love, but the awkward ones, like how funerals are fun sometimes or how it’s exciting to watch buildings burning.

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