I am not sure how to be fair to this collection of stories. I liked the first collection of Lucia Berlin stories in general and thought they were good, entertaining, and refreshing in a lot of ways. They were a kind of lost gem. Then I read the “memoir” published last year, and started to realize that whatever her output as a writer, those stories were the best. She died too young and didn’t write nearly as much as the world could have hoped for, but there’s a kind of literary thirstiness around her writing right now that is drying up quickly.
It’s hard to imagine a selected collection of short stories — pulling out the best 30 or so and publishing them in a nearly 500 page retrospective collection — was going to leave much work of quality left. She published about 75 or so stories and I think the literary establishment is starting to realize that there’s an unpaid debt with her work, but we all might have been better served republishing the original collection than to keep dipping into an increasingly shallow well.
This is the best of the rest collection, and it feels like it. It’s still engaging and it’s still interesting, but we’re running out of the “magic” as it were. This is more of a collection for those who didn’t just enjoy the original publication from a few years back A Manual for Cleaning Women, but became obsessed with it.
Dead authors are tough sometimes, especially when their output was clearly under potential. But the same with every subsequent Roberto Bolano book that comes out, I worry these are going to be increasingly less and less good.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Evening-Paradise-Stories-Lucia-Berlin/dp/0374279489/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1S9RJ3QYWPJWL&keywords=evening+in+paradise+lucia+berlin&qid=1551801026&s=gateway&sprefix=evening+in+p%2Caps%2C128&sr=8-1)