Charles Bukowski- South of No North

South of No North

HarperCollins

Charles Bukowski

1973 (Collected)

Other Bukowski Reviews; Post Office - Factotum - Women - Ham on Rye - Tales of Ordinary Madness - Notes of a Dirty Old Man

“My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.”

When people talk about Charles Bukowski, they almost always only talk about his Henry Chinaski-starring series of novels and about his poetry. His career as a short-story writer unfairly gets overlooked, I feel, though Bukowski was such a prolific author that there are numerous collections available bringing together samples of the many, many articles he wrote for various underground literary magazines throughout the 1960's and beyond. I've quickly looked at a couple of them on this blog, Tales of Ordinary Madness and Notes of a Dirty Old Man, collected in eye-catching new editions by Virgin, and while I enjoyed the material individually I do feel that as collections they're somewhat inconsistent; where the frantic pace and anger of the author's tone combined with the lack of context (for me, anyway) for many of the topics and references ultimately took away some enjoyment when reading them from start to finish as one chronological piece. 

South of No North, however, broke the streak of awkward Bukowski collections by collecting a much more balanced selection of work. Collected early on in Bukowski's career (proceeded by only Post Office in relation to the full-length adventures of Henry Chinaski), the stories collected here are incredibly raw and fresh, lifted of the invisible responsibility of reputation surrounding Bukowski's later work. Initially  collected and published by Bukowski supporters Black Sparrow Press, it's easy to see just how South of No North would've thrown the heavy-drinking, no-care-giving power of Bukowki's evocative and familiar, yet totally unique voice into the American literary conscious, and provided a strong backbone for Bukowski to build his name upon.

Young Charles

 From the very beginning of this collection, Bukowki's voice is in full flow, detailing short stories of low-life hedonism and crime starring ordinary people. You and Your Beer and How Great You Are is an early example of a biting, sardonic narrators voice telling the story of an egotistical boxer and his tired girlfriend. No Way To Paradise is the first story in the book I really loved, partially due to how unexpectedly surreal it is; Hank the narrator (probably Henry Chinaski, but it's not made explicitly clear) is sat in a bar when he meets a woman who has purchased a set of four miniature manufactured people who argue, fight, and sleep together for her amusement. There's a fairly even divide between the semi-autobiographical pieces we're used to from Bukowski as Chinaski and third-person character narratives, such as Love for $17.50, about a man who fills his need for a woman with a shop-bought mannequin. Such stories are strange and compelling, without a clear moral explanation besides the nagging feeling that it's powered by Bukowki's own jet black humour.

Later on in the collection the links between these stories and Bukowki's overarching literary intentions become clearer, as he slips further into the autobiographical fable mode that powered Post Office and would his later novels. The Way the Dead Love and All the Assholes in the World and Mine are great, great reads by themselves, but also seem like prototypes for his next novel Factotum. The longer short-story (nice oxymoron) Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts is very much an early version of a few chapters from Ham on Rye (released almost ten years later), including the same disturbing hatred of Bukowki's own adolescence. These later stories in this collection are all at least twice the length of the earlier ones, which I felt really added to the balance and variety of this collection, making it easier to read through consecutively.

Easily my favourite of all the Bukowski collections I've read so far, South of No North works on several levels; as a stand-alone collection of ingenious stylistic ideas, as a fascinating curio in relation to his later works, and quite probably as a powerful, undiluted introduction to Bukowki for readers curious about his work. Always powerful, occasionally disturbing, and amusingly poignant, South of No North collects the work of a man forcing himself onto the literary scene.