Evening in Paradise by Lucia Berlin5/20/2023 Stories of familial intimacy are tinged with dread stories of violence or indignity are touched by beauty. But perhaps Berlin’s itinerancy-geographic, vocational, and interpersonal-contributes to her most striking qualities as a writer: attention to the mutability of impressions, an appreciation and acceptance of contradictions, an acknowledgment of surprising coexistences.Įvening in Paradise, Berlin’s latest collection of short stories, and Welcome Home, her uncompleted memoir, consist of an array of contrasting, shifting, and intermingling tonalities. This life, lacking obvious coherence, was immured in luxury and “high society” in Santiago, financial and personal woes in Oakland, and relative peace and contentment in Boulder.Īsked in an interview, published by Gargoyle magazine in 1990, about how frequent geographical changes influenced her work, she said, “I have a lot to write about!” She continued, “But there is an episodic, impressionistic quality … sort of like snap-shots or postcards.” As a reader, tracing the contours of Berlin’s life is a difficult task. Lucia Berlin (1936–2004) lived an ever-shifting life characterized by disruptions, reversals, and returns. A wealthy dilettante: the men she married and divorced. Santiago, Chile El Paso, TX Albuquerque, NM New York, NY Oakland, CA Boulder, CO: these were a few of the places she lived.Ī sculptor. Schoolteacher, dressmaker, cleaning woman, ER clerk, switchboard operator, oral historian: these were a few of the jobs that occupied Lucia Berlin.
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