A review by luxxybee97
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring lighthearted mysterious reflective relaxing sad tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

   Lucia Berlin’s prose is electrifyingly lucid, the kind of prose that makes me feel like I’m never going to be a good writer because when writing like this exists, how on earth are you ever meant to compare? She says only what she has to say, never wasting a single letter, not a single space on the page, and the result are stories that skim surfaces while casting ripples below, shadows that soar and dive and spread themselves across your mind, seeping into your skin and bones and organs to the hidden places far inside you. It’s impossible to tell where reality begins and fiction ends, but that’s the fun thing. Berlin keeps you on your toes – blink over a sentence and you’ll miss a crucial detail, something that anchors the entire picture. 

 

   The stories that stood out to me most were Carlotta and her sister Sally. Their relationship as sisters growing up under the shadow of an abusive mother, and who then find each other years later when time is melting away like ice under a hot sun, has a bittersweet catharsis to it – you’re glad they can look back on the past from a safe distance, but the end is growing closer too, from not such as distance, and it’s heart-breaking. I feel like I was lying with them in Sally’s apartment, listening to the rattle of her breathing, watching sun shining through the window. Or perhaps I’m with Lucia in rehab, where she confronts alcoholism with unflinching realism, showing its horror and its hilarity in stark, uncompromising detail. That’s the thing, the book is often so funny, so silly, finding any speck of light it can in the darkest, deepest places, and Berlin is skilled enough of a writer to be able to balance the two sides of the world like a knife between her fingers.