This short story collection, selected from all the stories Lucia Berlin wrote over the course of her life, was published 11 years after her death in 2004 and became an unexpected bestseller - but I’m not really sure why. Lucia (pronounced Lu-see-a) Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women is a very unimpressive collection.
So unimpressive that I can recall about a half dozen of them - out of 43! - and only two or three were really compelling, if only for being rather morbid. Like Unmanageable, about an alcoholic mother battling the DTs early one morning and tries to get a drink before her kids wake up and go to school. There’s also Carmen, about a pregnant woman forced to become a drug mule for her heroin addict partner, and Mijito, about a poor girl with a baby as she struggles through the system.
I noticed the same subjects popping up in a lot of the stories - life in the south and Latin America, alcoholism/rehab, Catholicism, motherhood, cancer treatment - and I gathered from the brief biographical note at the end that these were all features of Berlin’s life. The handful of stories about addiction were the most interesting though they didn’t say anything different from other similar stories.
And the stories about everything else were instantly forgettable. The subjects are dull, the endings are weak - either trying for a punchline or just fading out - and some stories attempt multiple characters’ narratives but Berlin’s unable to differentiate between the voices so they all sound the same and it’s confusing if you’re not paying attention (which is likely as the material does little to hold it!).
They’re generally well-written stories but it’s not hard to see why Lucia Berlin was (and still is, relatively speaking) an unknown writer to the wider reading public in her lifetime - A Manual for Cleaning Women is too often about as dreary as reading an actual manual.
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