It all started at a literature workshop in New Mexico, United States, when a young college student from Alaska read a story he had written and, while waiting to hear the opinions of others, discovered that they did not like it. The title of the story is “Apples,” say a forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, or the apple tree that woke Isaac Newton up in an orchard in England and explained to him the theory of gravity. The opening of this latest anthology by Lucia Berlin, where she initially shows some traces of her talent, marks the author’s introduction in the narrative of two different characters, a young wife and her almost hundred-year-old neighbor. Mr. Hanraty, establish a special rapport. Lucia Berlin began writing short stories at the age of twenty-one through a creative writing workshop. She chose the University of New Mexico because Ramón J. Sender, author of “Chronicle of Dawn,” one of her favorite novels, was teaching there. Lucia Berlin was a woman of the world, lived in Latin America and knew how to speak Spanish. In Arthur Miller’s novel The Wayward Lives, Gay Langland’s character asks Roslyn, “Since when do you know a man by asking him questions?” Since he said, we can say that the same thing is true for Lucia Berlin and that it will not be that easy to get to know her. This is not a question of a series of questions and answers, but, as he says in one of the texts included in this volume, reading his stories is a question about his clear view of the world, his subtlety and critical understanding of the scenes he portrays as slides. , A New Life, to which his son Jeff Berlin contributed notes to this edition, especially for Spanish-language readers.
Let’s say it is a part of the life story of the American author, who presents himself with a photo that resembles us on the covers of his books, from the overwhelming nature of Alaska to the southern landscapes of New Mexico. She has the splendor of an actress in the comedies of Rock Hudson and Doris Day, but there is much more to her literature than that; Slides of American reality, Anglo-Saxons and Spanish Americans, as he shows us in the story “Life of Life”. Elsa” is the genre that the author gravitates towards with his psychological stories and gentle narrative style. And as Lucia Berlin shows us in her article “Designing Literature: The writer as typographer”, the important thing is that for a story to work, the author does not intend to distort it, but rather transform it, conveying the emotion. he is not looking for it, so much so that he realizes a fact.In the same article he also reveals that the visual is a source of inspiration for him, so writing is not primarily a verbal thing.
Lucia Berlin is from the same generation as another American writer who suffered curses; John Kennedy Toole, author of the magnificent novel A Confederacy of Dunces, set in New Orleans and whose success came only after his death. To a certain point, we could say that both Toole and Berlin share a parallel, albeit not to the tragic extreme, of the suicide of the author and creator of the iconic character Ignatius Reilly, and that poetic justice grants him posthumous right to death. Extraordinary and important Pulitzer Prize in the United States. Lucia Berlin’s burst of success came a few years after her death, with the anthology of her stories, The Cleaning Ladies’ Handbook.
Among the fifteen stories that make up this anthology, Berlin’s son notes in his notes the influence on some of his mother’s stories by the great writer of 19th-century Russian literature, Anton Chekhov, “Romanticism (In Chekhov’s Revival)” and “A New Life”, He is an indispensable writer of the psychological tendency in the short story genre. In the appendix of the articles written by the author, Lucia Berlin includes “Bloqueada”, in which she reveals the creative blockage that can sometimes affect a writer, and in the “Diaries” section, she contributes to showing us the author’s personal image.
The author has captured very well the axiom of narrative technique, almost tritely, that literature is not what is told, but how it is told, and from this perspective Berlin has benefited from anecdotes from his own life. transforming them into stories, that is, his life was the raw material of his literature, say, the capacity of imagination in relating reality or visual memories transformed by narration. Berlin’s stories have a tendency to point to something that is not explicitly said; We can call it a foggy ellipsis, as if literature was drawing a drawing in the air and the reader had to see it through the written expression. Lucia Berlin, who celebrated her death anniversary last November 12, evokes the voice of a free spirit who gave up being what others expected her to be.