But I Don’t Ever Lie: On Lucia Berlin
LUCIA BERLIN IN ALBUQUERQUE, 1961. PHOTO: BUDDY BERLIN/LITERARY ESTATE OF LUCIA BERLIN
There are masters of the paragraph and masters of the sentence; Lucia Berlin is the master of the fragment. Her deliberate abbreviations slipstream off one another. Less drag, high velocity; the story propels forward. Take this succession from the story “Strays,” set in a desolate rehab facility outside Albuquerque: “Fallen-down barracks. Torn and rusted venetian blinds rattling in the wind. Pinups peeled off the walls. Three- or four-foot sand dunes in every room. Dunes, with waves and patterns like in postcards from the Painted Desert.” Rather than create pauses, her descriptions ignite the story, keep it in motion. Like this from “The Musical Vanity Boxes,” as Raúl, a father from Juarez, leads young “Lucha” and her Syrian best friend Hope back over the border to El Paso: “Gentle, like the pull of a dowser’s branch, drawing our bony bodies into the pachuco beat of his walk, so light, slow, swinging.”
Berlin’s first posthumous collected stories, (2015), showcased her extraordinary and underappreciated talent and her fantastic range; the second, , recently published alongside a companion volume of her memoir and letters, presumes to show us this and more:
