{"id":8004,"date":"2018-12-23T07:21:49","date_gmt":"2018-12-23T07:21:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8004"},"modified":"2018-12-28T12:46:39","modified_gmt":"2018-12-28T12:46:39","slug":"evening-in-paradise-by-lucia-berlin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8004","title":{"rendered":"Evening in Paradise by Lucia Berlin"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>More Stories
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Picador 1 November 2018<\/strong><\/p>\n

256pp, hardback, \u00a314.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Here is another collection of leap-off-the-page, life-enhancing stories by the wonderful American writer Lucia Berlin, who died in 2015.\u00a0 How she can have been neglected for so long is a complete mystery, not explained by her famous alcoholism.\u00a0 She is up there with Hemingway, Miles Davis and O\u2019Keeffe.<\/p>\n

Berlin\u2019s frankness and humour apart, it is the power of observation that blows one\u2019s mind.\u00a0 Walking in the rain, in deserted downtown Manhattan, one of her narrators, Lisa, wants her companion to \u2018see it as beautiful, the city, her city\u2019:<\/p>\n

\u2018She knew he didn\u2019t.\u00a0 He was looking at the men eating raw yams and stolen grapefruit, or burning orange crates in rusty incinerators.\u00a0 Bronze K Ration 6 FOR A DOLLAR cans, green Gallo Port bottles glistening in the light of the fires, shimmering in the rain.\u00a0 An old man vomited into the gutter where purple fruit wrappers blurred indigo at the grate liked crushed anemones.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

Finding beauty was Berlin\u2019s gift.\u00a0 She captured it in words on the page as some of her contemporaries did in paint or music or photography, and seems to have been impelled to record it despite the struggles – against addictions of one sort or another\u00a0 –\u00a0 with which she and her characters wrestled.<\/p>\n

Many of these stories are set in places far from Manhattan: Chile, New Mexico, Mexico City, or the Western mining towns of Berlin\u2019s childhood.\u00a0 They chart the growth of Berlin\u2019s sensibility.\u00a0 From the action-packed account of two seven-year-olds selling \u2018chances\u2019 in their neighbourhood (El Paso, 1943) to a Gothic tale of sexual assault in Chile, to story after story of husbands and wives and lovers, such is the immediacy that we are with Berlin every step of the way as she shows without blinking the path from innocence to experience.<\/p>\n

One of the things she does is say the unsayable (such as that funerals can be funny, or marriage drive you crazy).\u00a0 She is also brilliant on the underside of glamour. \u00a0And always there\u2019s the feeling that the show goes on, if at all humanly possible: children are looked after, families are fed, doctorates are written, artist husbands and lovelorn women-friends are supported, jazz and sex are relished.<\/p>\n

In the very first story, seven-year-old Lucia is put to bed by Mamie, her grandmother –\u00a0 not exactly in disgrace, more because she has been snatched from the jaws of disaster –\u00a0\u00a0 and given \u2018custard and cocoa, the food she served to the sick or the damned\u2019.\u00a0 It is this combination of warmth and extremity that shines out in every word Lucia Berlin writes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

* A 2018 Notable Book<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

Many of these stories are set in places far from Manhattan: Chile, New Mexico, Mexico City, or the Western mining towns of Berlin\u2019s childhood. They chart the growth of Berlin\u2019s sensibility. From the action-packed account of two seven-year-olds selling \u2018chances\u2019 in their neighbourhood (El Paso, 1943) to a Gothic tale of sexual assault in Chile, to story after story of husbands and wives and lovers, such is the immediacy that we are with Berlin every step of the way as she shows without blinking the path from innocence to experience […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8004"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8004\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8079,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8004\/revisions\/8079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}