Hot Water Music
 |
| Ecco Publishing |
Charles Bukowski
1983
Other Bukowski Reviews; Post Office - South of No North - Factotum - Women - Ham on Rye - Hollywood - Pulp - Tales of Ordinary Madness - Notes of a Dirty Old Man
“Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you'll never meet them.”
I couldn't help but constantly compare Charles Bukowski's early 80's short story collection Hot Water Music to another collection I read prior, South of No North (both published in similar pulp-like editions by Ecco Press- an imprint of HarperCollins seemingly looking to replicate the original underground press feel of original publishers Black Sparrow Press), to look at how the author continued to refine his unique style of writing over the ten year difference in publication dates. The key overall impression I got from the 1973 collection from an as-then relatively unknown author was a raw, unrefined and barely-controllable anger, wallowing in the mire of a down-and-out alcoholic beatnik lifestyle. Mixing autobiographical works (starring Bukowski's alter-ego of his novels, Henry Chinaski) with some more original story ideas (though we're still talking about Bukowski here, his settings are still very familiar) Hot Water Music was a very easy, enjoyable read.
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The first story is a simply outrageous and incredibly black concept that would surely come across like a punch in the face to anyone experiencing his writing for the first time. You Kissed Lily is a short domestic horror story about a wife violently obsessing over her husbands infidelity from five years ago, until she snaps and shoots him in a fit of rage. Bukowski's minimalistic narration gives the feeling of brutal inevitability, of unsympathetic lowlife culture, but with a tongue-in-cheek undertone punctuated by a finalising punchline that confirms the whole thing as a disguised comedy all along. Later on the story Decline and Fall left a similar feeling of urban horror, in a second-hand story told to a barman about a meeting with voyeuristic couple who make him question his understanding of good and evil relating to hedonism. The masterful balance of violence with apathy; Bukowski's ability to control the tempo of his prose and the attention of his audience, go along with the chronology of his work to suggest that this was critically his best period.
The forth Henry Chinaski novel Ham on Rye is, to me, the best of all Bukowski's novels in offering his most meaningful, most desolate writing, and the form he showed there carries on into this collection released one year later. There may be those who find less enjoyment in Bukowski's most personal, self analytical and critical work because it is noticeably bleaker than his earlier, almost jaunty novels like Post Office and Factotum, but the fact remains to me that the amusing character of Chinaski who rolled through those novels with a harem of strange women and angry bosses always had a much darker side to his nature. To that end Bukowski includes within Hot Water Music the story The Death of the Father, which I read as an epilogue to Ham on Rye. The title gives the topic away with that one, as Chinaski attends his father's funeral without remorse, then takes the old man's last girlfriend afterwards, for good measure.
Most of the other stories have momentary plots that wouldn't sound interesting here, but rely on Bukowski's poetic mastery of one-liners and love of the down and outs. Some of them, like Home Run, have an unpleasantness to them. Bukowski made it very clear many times about his disdain for the human race, and that hatred flows from the page through the acts of morally repugnant characters in desperate situations. This was my favourite of all the Bukowski collections (I've so far read, only three left by my count), fiction or non, displaying Bukowski at his creative peak.
I couldn't help but constantly compare Charles Bukowski's early 80's short story collection Hot Water Music to another collection I read prior, South of No North (both published in similar pulp-like editions by Ecco Press- an imprint of HarperCollins seemingly looking to replicate the original underground press feel of original publishers Black Sparrow Press), to look at how the author continued to refine his unique style of writing over the ten year difference in publication dates. The key overall impression I got from the 1973 collection from an as-then relatively unknown author was a raw, unrefined and barely-controllable anger, wallowing in the mire of a down-and-out alcoholic beatnik lifestyle. Mixing autobiographical works (starring Bukowski's alter-ego of his novels, Henry Chinaski) with some more original story ideas (though we're still talking about Bukowski here, his settings are still very familiar) Hot Water Music was a very easy, enjoyable read.
The first story is a simply outrageous and incredibly black concept that would surely come across like a punch in the face to anyone experiencing his writing for the first time. You Kissed Lily is a short domestic horror story about a wife violently obsessing over her husbands infidelity from five years ago, until she snaps and shoots him in a fit of rage. Bukowski's minimalistic narration gives the feeling of brutal inevitability, of unsympathetic lowlife culture, but with a tongue-in-cheek undertone punctuated by a finalising punchline that confirms the whole thing as a disguised comedy all along. Later on the story Decline and Fall left a similar feeling of urban horror, in a second-hand story told to a barman about a meeting with voyeuristic couple who make him question his understanding of good and evil relating to hedonism. The masterful balance of violence with apathy; Bukowski's ability to control the tempo of his prose and the attention of his audience, go along with the chronology of his work to suggest that this was critically his best period.The forth Henry Chinaski novel Ham on Rye is, to me, the best of all Bukowski's novels in offering his most meaningful, most desolate writing, and the form he showed there carries on into this collection released one year later. There may be those who find less enjoyment in Bukowski's most personal, self analytical and critical work because it is noticeably bleaker than his earlier, almost jaunty novels like Post Office and Factotum, but the fact remains to me that the amusing character of Chinaski who rolled through those novels with a harem of strange women and angry bosses always had a much darker side to his nature. To that end Bukowski includes within Hot Water Music the story The Death of the Father, which I read as an epilogue to Ham on Rye. The title gives the topic away with that one, as Chinaski attends his father's funeral without remorse, then takes the old man's last girlfriend afterwards, for good measure.
Most of the other stories have momentary plots that wouldn't sound interesting here, but rely on Bukowski's poetic mastery of one-liners and love of the down and outs. Some of them, like Home Run, have an unpleasantness to them. Bukowski made it very clear many times about his disdain for the human race, and that hatred flows from the page through the acts of morally repugnant characters in desperate situations. This was my favourite of all the Bukowski collections (I've so far read, only three left by my count), fiction or non, displaying Bukowski at his creative peak.
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