Eric Maas’s Reviews > A Manual for Cleaning Women > Status Update

20. Sex appeal

19. Electric. Car, El Paso
Funny little anecdote (but even then the dark side is never far away).

18. Unmanageable
Driven in despair. A woman trying to keep a straight face for her children while being chased by alcohol addiction. Shortest story yet but devastating. Cried my eyes out. Alcohol is not my fix but that doesn’t mean I can’t relate…

17. Friends
Who needs whom?

16. Melina

The desire to be such a person like Melina. The desire to experience such contingencies like when three separate stories are one. And the shameful but very relatable desire to be the inly one to know this and use it for a palm reading to deceive, to charm and impress…

15. Good and bad
Sad sweet Miss Dawson. Maybe she was enamoured with Lucie. Love her for her sincerity, for keeping with her humanity even when she is a nun. Her plead, to not leave her is heartbreaking. As is Lucie’s final thoughts after her betrayal: There was nobody to speak to. To say I was sorry.

…run by French nuns, lovely old nuns, with fleur-de-lis coifs and blue-gray habits. They floated through the dark rooms, above the stone floors, flew down the passages by the flowered courtyard, popped open wooden shutters, calling out in birdlike voices.

14. Toda luna, todo año

Melancholic, sensuous. Eloise Gore has accepted a certain life’s sadness, but she’s open and prepared for the surprises of a single’s holiday. Berlin touches me. She took me to a most relatable mood, even though it’s been over thirty years that I experienced anything remotely similar.

13. Carpe Diem
Confusion and beef at the laundromat. And Ophelia, for a moment taken for this giant black Sybil, this Sphinx.

12. Temps Perdu