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alexandra13's review against another edition
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
sophieecook's review against another edition
5.0
a stunning collection of stories, that almost reads as a novel. lucia’s writing is incandescent, it glows with life and love and pain. i’ve never been so entranced by short stories, and this may be the beginning of a love affair with berlin’s work.
tom_f's review against another edition
5.0
Doesn’t bear casual commentary, really, since there’s so little artifice in Berlin’s own writing (it’s bracing to research her autobiographical interviews and find her repeating phrases and details from her ‘fiction’ verbatim). ‘Writing about’ is contra Berlin’s great project; this isn’t a look at life but rather life itself, lived, so much so that reading her work is the closest we’ll get to an adequate substitute for the real thing.
gorecki's review against another edition
4.0
I approached Evening in Paradise with high expectations and some reserve - I've been disappointed by hyped books and authors more often than I want to admit, and while I was very curious about Lucia Berlin, I was also trying to be prepared for a disappointment. After the first four stories in Evening in Paradise, I took a deep breath and convinced myself I was right. We won't be great friends. I braced myself for another book I'll need to "power through", and continued reading grudgingly. But then something happened. I started to see connections and to link things together, and after reading up a bit on Lucia Berlin and her life, the whole book started to open up in front of me on a completely unexpected level.
I don't know how much in these stories is autobiography and how much is fiction inspired by true events in Berlin's life, but the way the path of her characters follows her own is quite disturbingly similar. And each next story brings more and more similarities, but also more delight as they are very subtly and masterfully connected, despite the fact that the characters in each story have different names. Starting from Lucha as an eight-year-old girl in New Mexico, through a sixteen year-old Laura in Chile, to Maya, Maggie and Laura again later on in the book - all these different female charaters follow the chronology of a single woman's life, from her childhood to her unsuccessful marriages and growing old. Each story reads as the natural progression of the previous one - it has one more child and one more unsuccessful marriage added to it, one more relocation and one more comic or sad event. Each new story is like the means of our narrator to reinvent herself and to become a new person with a new name and a new story. And all these connections between every next story kept making me feel like I'm reading a novel which expands and branches out into new territories without having the constraints a novel usually brings with it and its storyline set in stone. Had I read this as a collection of individual short stories, I would have probably been very disappointed. Unintentionally reading it as a novel, however, made me absolutely love it. I don't know if the stories were collected and edited in this order by a geniius editor or by Berlin herself, but whoever it was, made a fantastic decision.
Lucia Berlin is an utter delight and excluding the few stories that didn't work that well for me or that weren't connected to the rest, this book was exceptional.
I don't know how much in these stories is autobiography and how much is fiction inspired by true events in Berlin's life, but the way the path of her characters follows her own is quite disturbingly similar. And each next story brings more and more similarities, but also more delight as they are very subtly and masterfully connected, despite the fact that the characters in each story have different names. Starting from Lucha as an eight-year-old girl in New Mexico, through a sixteen year-old Laura in Chile, to Maya, Maggie and Laura again later on in the book - all these different female charaters follow the chronology of a single woman's life, from her childhood to her unsuccessful marriages and growing old. Each story reads as the natural progression of the previous one - it has one more child and one more unsuccessful marriage added to it, one more relocation and one more comic or sad event. Each new story is like the means of our narrator to reinvent herself and to become a new person with a new name and a new story. And all these connections between every next story kept making me feel like I'm reading a novel which expands and branches out into new territories without having the constraints a novel usually brings with it and its storyline set in stone. Had I read this as a collection of individual short stories, I would have probably been very disappointed. Unintentionally reading it as a novel, however, made me absolutely love it. I don't know if the stories were collected and edited in this order by a geniius editor or by Berlin herself, but whoever it was, made a fantastic decision.
Lucia Berlin is an utter delight and excluding the few stories that didn't work that well for me or that weren't connected to the rest, this book was exceptional.
brianthehuman's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
kruton's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
2.0
lamijka's review against another edition
5.0
Nasza rodzima ducholożka pisała o żółtym odcieniu zdjęć z lat 70, czy 80. Czytając ten zbiór opowiadań w pomarańczowej oprawie też myślałam o takiej ciepłej przesłonie, filtrze, który opisywane historie spowija sentymentalnie w delikatny puch dający amortyzację wspomnieniom, które bez niego mogłyby nie być takie pomarańczowe.
residentcrab's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
marcelll's review against another edition
3.0
pierwsza połowa opowiadań była przyjemna, ciepła, miała kolor okładki. Potem zaczynały po trochu tracić charakter