In the prose itself, shift and surprise produce a liveliness that is the mark of her art.”īorn in Alaska, Lucia Berlin published seventy-six stories in her lifetime, and died on her 68th birthday about a decade ago. In his introduction to this collection, her friend Stephen Emerson writes that if her stories have a “secret ingredient, it is suddenness. Just a page long, and five paragraphs, it is tightly wound and agile, appropriate for a tiny muscular athlete. Berlin ingeniously shifts tone within just a sentence, and juxtaposes wildly different observations. The story is a prose poem of thought bombs. It shuddered and shimmered like that of a splendid young colt. “He quieted in my arms, blew and snorted softly. Because his clothes were so complicated it was as if I were performing an elaborate ritual. Muñoz lay there, unconscious, a miniature Aztec god. I undress people all the time and it’s no big deal, takes a few seconds. Right into an Emergency Room where jockeys have “wonderful X-rays” because they break bones, tape themselves up and keep riding and “(t)heir skeletons look like trees, like reconstructed brontosaurs.” As a horse racing fan, I started with “My Jockey,” the shortest story in the bunch.īam. The sly wink of the title caught me: Cleaning Women or Cleaning Women? I had intended to tear through the daily mail, but paused to look at this collection.
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