Especially the by is an amazingly wonderful collection of short stories. To the person I admired most in this world, I mattered back. Blood, bones, tendons seem like affirmations to me. Those thoughts passed through her head as she worked, but it was nice, the cool black dirt, the sun on her back. Lucia had an incredible pain tolerance, but radiation got to her.
But Anna came home and was fine, except that there was so much to be done in the garden. This is writing of a very high order. Shut the door on grief on regret on remorse. Sometimes the endings of the stories didn't quite satisfy, and actually I think these could have been broken down into two volumes. I suspect a form of manslaughter sometimes, the husband or some other regular rescuer having at last finally tired of showing up just in the guilty nick of time. In 'Tiger Bites,' narrated by an El Paso woman who heads to Juarez for an illegal abortion, the pain of her experience and the pieties of her family at home collide. What if I didn't like it? I wasn't going to review this book.
She didn't speak, but smiled and held Sam's hand while he told her how he had done a load of wash, watered the tomatoes, mulched the beans, washed dishes, made lemonade. They are dense and full of life. Perhaps, as Jeff Berlin has suggested, her memory failed her. Not a word is wasted and her voice is so strong and compelling. Anyway, thank heavens it's over. Some are rough and raw and uncomfortable, and some are tender and insightful, with characters from young children to extremely old people.
Maybe someone mentioned her and said I should read her. I am convinced that this is always an accident. Language of consistent affirmations for a faith in next to nothing. If you don't do it you feel guilty and if you do you feel like a wimp. Sam tended it with logs he had split himself.
What I like best about Lucia Berlin's stories isn't their verisimilitude although they do feel very true —rather, it's their casual artfulness, their compressed lyricism, wry humor, and searing insight. I am also alarmed at my own feelings of revulsion and a hardening that begin to steal over me as these stories repeat themselves many times over. Berlin's beautiful, rangy prose builds into unpredictable shapes that speak of the sprawling rural and urban western and South American landscapes that fueled her imagination. Then I saw her room: all the tubes and machinery swallowed up in beautiful floral arrangements. The difficulties of being a single mother, dealing with alcohol and drugs and in the later stories, dreams and mortality. Loretta would see Anna from time to time when she went to swim at her neighbor Elaine's pool.
What distinguishes many of her stories, though, is the erotic desire energizing the characters, even in the unpromising arena of an Emergency Room. She ranks with Hemingway and Carver as a short story writer. Given how the book is autobiographically inspired and the author was fluent in Spanish, it would have been better if the readers had checked the occassional Spanish words included. Today I stole a bottle of Spice Islands sesame seeds. You never know what to expect.
If I can do what she did there, once, ever, that will be enough. Todo Luna, Todo Año A middle-aged English teacher on holiday at a Mexican beach resort. She certainly has a good understanding of people living in pent-up, nervous America compared to laid-back Hispanic countries. She was a little embarrassed, but relieved that he took her in. A beautiful collection of short stories that inspire compassion and imagination. It pains me that it has taken so long for us to recognize her power and mastery, that she will never know how deeply she has affected this new generation of readers. She's moving to her trailer in Boulder.
And even after I have scarfed the stupid thing out of the bottom of the purse in which it has been covered by nameless objects of minutia some of her sentences seem like 3 trunks dumped into These stories make me feel as if I am having an asthma attack and I'm trying super hard to suck in the oxygen. I want you to feel that too. First the big room—the kitchen and living room—was built. Whenever she was writing, she would show me what she was working on. Lucia was particular about her gifts. And then ran off to New York City, hung out with artists and Beats, married a sculptor and two jazz musicians in six years, and obliterated her health on Jim Beam over decades.