Evening in Paradise

July 15, 2018
Twenty-two more stories from an author who died in 2004 and made it big in 2015.Berlin (A Manual for Cleaning Women, 2015, etc.) published 76 stories in her lifetime in a number of small-press books. Three years ago, a collection that reprinted 43 of them took the literary world by storm, with placement on top-ten lists and comparisons to Carver, Paley, Munro, and Chekhov abounding. (The book was also a finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction.) Blessedly, a second volume with 22 more stories is in no way second rate but rather features more seductive, sparkling autofiction with narrators whose names echo the author's in settings and situations that come from her roller-coaster biography (which is summarized in an appendix). The stories are arranged in roughly chronological order, beginning with two set in El Paso, Texas, about a little troublemaker named Lucha, followed by three in Chile. In "Andado: A Gothic Romance," Laura's family is invited to spend four days at the country estate of a man named Don Andrés. Her parents can't make it, so they send her by herself. "Ted said his child would be coming, not a lovely woman," comments the former ambassador to France, one of the wealthiest men in Chile. "I'm fourteen," Laura replies. "I'm just all dressed up for this party." This information will not have much effect on Don Andrés' conduct. The title story takes its inspiration from the period when the author was married to Buddy Berlin, a jazz player and sometime heroin addict, and the two lived with their kids outside Puerto Vallarta. It features cameos by Richard Burton, Liz Taylor, Ava Gardner, and John Huston, whose appearance in that area during the filming of Night of the Iguana is legendary. Its lightheartedness is immediately balanced by "La Barca de la Ilusión," which finds its protagonist in a palapa with a floor of sand on the Mexican coast, home-schooling her boys, hoping that living in the middle of nowhere will keep her husband off drugs. (What she does to his dealer is probably fictional, but we'll never know.) For black humor and alcoholism, go straight to "The Wives," in which two exes of the same man get together to chug rum and reminisce, spilling drinks and burning holes in their clothes.No dead author is more alive on the page than Berlin: funny, dark, and so in love with the world.

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Starred review from September 10, 2018
This wonderful posthumous collection from Berlin (A Manual for Cleaning Women) ranges from short, one-page stories about the poor and working class to longer romantic tales about the disaffected daughters of aristocrats in South America. The collection is significant partly because it reveals the centrality of homesickness and geography to Berlin’s work. The elegant title story is set in a hotel in Mexico where the cast and crew of The Night of the Iguana are staying. The American movie stars living in “paradise” at the resort are worn out and distracted compared to the vibrant Mexicans who run the hotel. “Lead Street, Albuquerque” follows two young couples whose lives are interrupted when a friend moves into their building and marries a 17-year-old girl. The friend, who becomes a wildly successful artist, leaves his young wife in the care of the other women, who help her care for her baby. One of the longest stories in the collection is “Andado: A Gothic Romance,” which follows Laura, a 14-year-old schoolgirl in Chile, as she visits the estate of wealthy widower Don Andres. The sexual tension between the older man and the younger girl escalates and eventually confuses the girl’s innocent notions of romance. Berlin’s writing achieves a dreamy, delightful effect as it provides a look back through time. This collection should further bolster Berlin’s reputation as one of the strongest short story writers of the 20th century.

October 1, 2018

Following the posthumous collection A Manual for Cleaning Women, which received major attention, here is a selection of Berlin's remaining stories proving that she should have been better known. Opening in the Southwest and Latin America, then spreading throughout the country, these works capture human relationships and interactions with care and grace, making the ordinary extraordinary and the extraordinary achingly familiar. Two young girls, one of Syrian descent, get into trouble selling chances on a Musical Vanity Box (sneaking into Juarez didn't help); in Chile, 14-year-oldAmerican Laura visits an estate and has a sexually charged encounter with an older man that she doesn't fully understand. In New York, a wife constantly corrected by her husband for saying postman rather than mailman sweetly announces, "on the way home I murdered the postman"--and gets corrected again. Her response--"David. Please talk to me"--says everything about the marriage. In a story about Aunt Zelda's inconvenient Christmas visit, a teenager admonished for his drinking shoots back, "I'm old for my age. Thirty-five is young to be a burnout." VERDICT Beautifully realized stories with good, old-fashioned virtues. [See Prepub Alert, 5/14/18.]

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2018

Published in 2015, A Manual for Cleaning Women posthumously collected stories by the brilliant, under-the-radar Berlin. It went off like firecrackers. Here are more stories, plus a memoir covering her peripatetic life from 1936 Alaska to 1966 Mexico.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.