Wretched ugliness, but with wit

These are stories of women who are, much like the author herself, restless wanderers: Tales that hook you from the start and don’t spare you the pain they hold.

Lucia Berlin once had her cigarette lit by Prince Aly Khan in Santiago, Chile. She would have been a teenager then and had a busy social life, attending cotillions and generally enjoying a privileged expat lifestyle. It wasn’t all champagne and ballgowns and waltzes with princes, however — by the time she died in 2004, Berlin had experienced both giddy highs and terrible lows.

Berlin, who was born in 1936 in Alaska, would make a name for herself as a short story writer in the 1960s through to the 80s. But a tumultuous personal life and a willingness to uproot herself from a steady existence and move cities and countries all contributed to a literary output that was unmatched but sporadic.

In 2015, A Manual for Cleaning Women, a collection of her finest short stories came out and she was hailed as a master of the form. Before that, her mystique and obvious literary talent had garnered her a loyal following among a select few. But with this posthumous collection, a contemporary audience had greater access to her work.

And what work it is — these are stories of women who are, much like Berlin herself, restless wanderers. These are not glamourous lives but hardscrabble ones, where money is often tight and protagonists search for salvation in the bottle. Alcoholism is something Berlin had first-hand experience of — like her mother before her, she too battled the disease for most of her life. So it’s hard not to read the stories in this book and make connections to Berlin’s actual life. In her foreword, Lydia Davis writes that Berlin had been writing auto-fiction before the term became ubiquitous in our own times. It makes sense then that Berlin’s picture was used on the cover of the collection when it first came out and it was easy to get enamoured by that Elizabeth Taylor-ish heat-generating beauty. This had to be someone, the viewer would think, who’d never lived a mundane existence.

When I read the stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women, I find myself marvelling at the way Berlin brings alive the textures of a life and milieu with the clearest and most direct prose. In the story that gives the collection its title, here’s the narrator describing one of the women she works for: “Mrs Jessel rarely cooks. When she does she makes Sesame Chicken. The recipe is pasted inside the spice cupboard. Another copy is in the stamp and string drawer and another in her address book.” In Toda Luna, Todo Año, set in Mexico, here’s Berlin describing the moment before it rains on the beach: “Fog. Two white cranes. Rippling of the turtle tied near the boat. The wind flickered the lantern, lightning illuminated the pale green sea. The cranes left and it began to rain.”

The stories hook you from the start. There’s something about the author’s voice that keeps you stuck to the page and eager to see how these tales unfold. Berlin uses the first person narrative in most of the stories and it’s like listening to a friend who sits you down and tells you a yarn that illustrates the wretched ugliness of the world along with its beauty. While these stories don’t spare you the pain they hold, Berlin’s voice brims with unmatched warmth and wit and you wish you could spend more time in her company. Lucia Berlin didn’t leave behind too many stories, but the ones she did are perfect and you feel grateful that they have been rediscovered and released into the world.

The author is a writer and communications professional. When she’s not reading, writing or watching cat videos, she can be found on Instagram @saudha_k where she posts about reading, writing, and cats.

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