Evening in Paradise: More Stories
Lucia Berlin
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Evening in Paradise: More Stories
Lucia Berlin
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
[In Evening in Paradise, there] is little if any diminishment in quality or intensity [of Berlin's work].
It’s no accident that many critics looking for Berlin’s peers compare her primarily to male authors (Hemingway, Raymond Carver), though the comparisons rarely do justice to her humor or her quirky, lavish prose style.
The stories in Evening in Paradise have that familiar Berlin affect—the clipped prose, the startling details, the signal one-liners or repeated words that burrow into you. Berlin’s prose reads like poetry and feels like memory. Fraught moments are telescoped into spare, suggestive exchanges that directly appeal to the senses.
For all the appropriateness of the comparison to writers like [Raymond] Carver, whether it's her description of the captivating beauty of the Sandia Mountains...or some other striking setting, Berlin's evocative prose brings an energy to her stories that's often a welcome counterpoint to the foreground narrative.
It seems likely that Evening in Paradise, the beautiful second anthology of Berlin's stories, will win over just as many readers as its predecessor. Just like A Manual for Cleaning Women, Berlin's new book is a marvel, filled with deeply touching stories about lives on the fringes. It's a work of remembrance of the kinds of people who might otherwise be forgotten.
To read Evening in Paradise, however, feels like living through the periods yourself. Like Chekhov, Berlin was a beautiful framer of stories. She knows how to draw an incident around a place and period.
Evening in Paradise is all the evidence anyone should need that Lucia Berlin is one of the best short story writers of her time. Across the board, Berlin’s short fiction holds an emotional timbre that is difficult to match. Her writing renders the exhaustive efforts of a day’s work commonplace and extraordinary, vibrant and unexpurgated, elated and forlorn. It’s the genuine paradise and tragedies of the everyday, unfiltered and wonderful..
Anyone worried that Evening in Paradise might somehow be inferior to Manual is in for a pleasant surprise. Containing about half the number of tales — 22 in all — this new collection of stories showcases the same remarkable skill and pathos that Berlin fans have long cherished. Berlin’s alluring prose consistently sets the reader up for unexpected and often harrowing shifts in action.
These stories showed Berlin’s extraordinary talent for landing in the middle of a life or a place and giving the reader an immediate sense of being there. Her writing is vivid, the pictures she makes are unforgettable. Evening in Paradise is a selection of her remaining stories, occasionally a touch scrappy, but mostly wonderful..
Evening in Paradise, as good as it is, feels vaguer at the edges than A Manual for Cleaning Women, which clapped closed. It suffers from a relative lack of hospital stories, which often emerge as her best, where her ever present sensuality inverts into an almost unbearable physical compassion. There’s nothing in this collection like ‘My Jockey’, but then what are we, kings? How often does a ‘My Jockey’ come along? Is there any limit to our entitlement?.
It is hard to read Lucia Berlin’s Evening in Paradise: More Stories, which is every bit as generous and perceptive as A Manual for Cleaning Women, and not feel some sense of frustration or exasperation at the fact that Berlin was not more widely read during her lifetime. Considered together, the two collections leave little doubt she is one of the greatest American short story writers of the 20th century.
Here is another collection of leap-off-the-page, life-enhancing stories by the wonderful American writer Lucia Berlin.
Dozens of passages offer up similarly vivid images of sky, weather, birds and flowers. [Berlin] does humans well, too, with a sharp eye for social, economic and regional differences.
... raw, elliptical, devilishly funny.
... why weren’t these 22 stories selected for [A Manual for Cleaning Women]? The answer, equally inevitably, is that they’re not as strong. There’s nothing here as harrowing, for example, as 'Unmanageable'.
The two recent volumes collecting her work... demonstrate that she was a true master of the short story.
...another, but no less satisfying, group of stories.
Are we scraping the bottom of the barrel, reading less impressive stories and oddments the author had not intended for publication? The answer is no — with a tiny bit of well, maybe. Most of the stories in the new collection are as stellar as those in [A Manual for Cleaning Women, though it trails off a bit at the end..
Twenty-two more stories from an author who died in 2004 and made it big in 2015.
This wonderful posthumous collection.