Charles Bukowski- Hot Water Music

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. 

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.

Charles Bukowski- Pulp

Pulp

Virgin Publishing

Charles Bukowski

1994

Other Bukowski Reviews; Post Office - South of No North - Factotum - Women - Ham on Rye - Hollywood - Tales of Ordinary Madness - Notes of a Dirty Old Man

"It was a hellish hot day and the air conditioner was broken. A fly crawled across the top of my desk. I reached out with the open palm of my hand and sent him out of the game."

Apologies to anyone sick of the constant Bukowski (and Auster) reviews going up on this blog recently, but I'm on a kick to complete their bibliographies and nothing will stop me. Well, plenty of things might stop me, but I hope they don't, okay? My accelerated race through the German-born author's bibliography led to the mild disappointment of his final, thinly-veiled autobiographical piece Hollywood, which itself upon completion left only one final mysterious novel for me to look at; the enigmatic, satirical, frustrated and unresolved Pulp. Before I received my copy through the mail I really had no idea what to expect (I tend to avoid book summations of works by authors I already respect, just to keep things as a surprise), and now, coming out of the novel, I feel somewhat overwhelmed by the strange combination of thoughts it left me with. It's not a good book, but it's a very interesting one.

I don't want to go into too much detail regarding the plot, for reasons that shall hopefully seem apparant, but let me start by saying that Pulp is both completely and undeniably unoriginal, and yet something totally unique. I think I might have to explain that one; the unoriginality is rather more obvious; Pulp is a satirical pastiche of hard-boiled detective fiction that includes all of the obvious stereotypes of the genre, ramped up to a Spinal Tap-like eleven with a notable ferocity. Bukowski's lead private dick is Nick Belane, a run-down no-good scumbag who, as these things go, is unexpectedly called upon by the most fatal of femme fatale's  to investigate a case. Her name is Lady Death, and her existence leads into the more self-referential, metaphysical side to this novel, which we'll get to in a second.

“I was feeling unfulfilled and, frankly, rather crappy about everything. I wasn't going anywhere and neither was the rest of the world. We were all just hanging around waiting to die and meanwhile doing little things to fill the space. Some of us weren't even doing little things.”

As these often go, Belane quickly finds himself picking up a couple of other cases, all of which seem to confusingly entwine with Lady Death. As he investigates, Belane pushes himself further and further into trouble- more trouble than Bukowski himself had expected, and so Belane finds himself having to viciously fight his way out of these desperate situations. Bukowski dedicates the book 'to bad writing', and all reports regarding Bukowski's thoughts on the writing process suggest the corners he found himself putting Belane in were as a result of his own lack of planning. This continues throughout the whole book, and so at no point does the reader get a solid grip on what's actual going on. Bukowski might have eventually sorted these problems out, but inconveniently died before he could, and as a result the plot is very poorly structured. 

Love this cover.

I think that the trouble Bukowski had writing Pulp stems from his ambitious attempts to make it stand out as a notable piece of postmodernism, in trying to represent on the page the thoughts of an author struggling with mortality. Belane regularly struggles for his life in brutal fights with lowlife thugs, as well as also witnessing the amazing immortality of the beings he finds himself tangled up with, since Belane quickly discovers that some of the people he's been investigating are really immortal aliens from outer space. It's a plot development that feels very in debt to Kurt Vonnegut, and Bukowski's prose has the same unwavering straight-faced style, where the narrator swings from straight forward descriptions of surreal concepts to brief introspective comments that suggest he might just be insane. Another author who I couldn't help thinking of is the late great Douglas Adams, and his two Dirk Gently detective novels, since there's a certain tone of dry humour about the supernatural intrusion into the detective genre that quickly reminded me of the Dirk Gently series. 

Upon finishing the last of Bukowski's novels, and the first to be truly fiction, I was mostly left with 'what if?' questions, about just what the author might have done in his career had he written more pure fiction. It's a moot point at the end of the day, but though I wouldn't undo any of the Henry Chinaski novels (well, maybe Hollywood if I absolutely had to) if I could, I think the evidence of Pulp suggests he would've come up with some very imaginative stuff. Unfortunately for Pulp itself, it's too handicapped by the circumstances of its writing and publication to be a really good novel by itself, but I did find it to be mostly fun from start to finish thanks to Bukowski's unwilting wit, and its explosive deconstruction of the detective fiction genre. It's a really strange way for Bukowski to bow out, but it somehow kind of fits.

Charles Bukowski- Hollywood

Hollywood

Cannongate

Charles Bukowski
1989

Other Bukowski Reviews; Post Office - South of No North - Factotum - Women - Ham on Rye - Tales of Ordinary Madness - Notes of a Dirty Old Man

“People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it.”

Back in 1971, the debut novel by one Charles Bukowski (who, by the way, was fifty-years-old at the time, giving me some semblance of hope I'll achieve something myself by then), Post Office, introduced the world to Henry Chinaski. Bukowski's barely disguised but definitely exaggerated alter-ego; a poverty-stricken, loveless poet wasting his life away working for the US postal system. Part of the appeal, alongside Bukowski's masterful writing talent, was the sheer power of the anger portrayed by the character based around his inability to fit in with or even tolerate contemporary society. Bukowski's second book (actually a prequel) Factotum continued along those lines to more critical success. Women, his third, offered a slightly mellower version of Chinaski who had earned some success as a poet, but whose rampaging affairs through girls and alcohol portrayed more sadness and inner torment. Ham on Rye took readers back to the childhood and adolescent origins of Chinaski/Bukowski, and was the angriest book of them all by some distance.

Chinaski's fifth and final printed adventure is a marked departure in tone and setting from his previous exploits, for reasons easily explained by the title alone; but does Bukowski's indomitable and unmistakable spirit suffer as a result? Or, as the man himself puts it, is he becoming something that he hates? I think it's up in the air. The plot of Hollywood appears (to me, anyway) to be probably the most thinly-disguised of all of Bukowski's roman à clefs, rewriting his experiences in the entertainment capital of the world during the production of his one and only movie screenplay, for the film Barfly. The actors and production staff behind the movie are given fake names (Micky Rourke becomes Jack Bledsoe, for example), as Chinaski witnesses the madness and inconsistencies of Hollywood and irs people first hand. Despite being cancelled about five times, Barfly (or The Dance of Jim Bean as this novel calls it) is finally made and released to moderate success, and Bukowski retires from screenplay writing for good. It's not an expansive, turn-based plot, but an aghast character study of an industry as seen by an outsider.

Smoking is cool.

The crucial difference between Hollywood and Bukowski's prior novels, every one of them to varying but notable extents, is that this Henry Chinaski is ridiculously mellow-tempered in comparison. He still drinks, but in moderation. He sticks to one, sensible girlfriend. His friends and Hollywood associates are crazy, but he simply watches in bemusement. It took this reader a good few pages to really start enjoying the book, so markedly different was the style. Ultimately I did enjoy it, since Bukowski's dry wit and memorable characterizations of his contemporaries are a lot of fun, but there was a notable edge missing. Because of this I can't help but categorize Hollywood as the 'worst' of the Henry Chinaski series in terms of how powerful I found it. This is probably due entirely to the short time-span between the real life events and the publication of the book (the author himself admits, maybe facetiously, towards the end of Hollywood that its creation was basically just something for him to do), where the line between Bukowski and Chinaski is so blurred as to become almost non-existent.

In a sense I really don't like to criticise this book much since it's a fairly organic and honest development of a character that never really had his own identity in the first place, but I can't help but admit it was an underwhelming way to see Chinaski go out, so to speak. Out of his element as a real barfly and too old and successful to stay truly angry, Chinaski witnesses this exorbitant facsimile of his past performed by people just crazy enough to give it some realism and doesn't seem to have enough of an impact on that world for me to fully care. In an ideal world the fictional Henry Chinaski would've died younger and angrier, with a burst of self-righteousness, and Bukowski would've written Hollywood as a non-fiction memoir, but there are just enough crazy people and anecdotes to make the book a good read.

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.

Charles Bukowski- Factotum

Factotum

Virgin Press

Charles Bukowski

1975

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

“I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.”

In hindsight I wish I could go back in time and change it so that I'd read through the main novels of Charles Bukowski in the chronological order he wrote them in, just because I'm obsessive compulsive like that. Instead I ended up reading the fourth book starring Bukowski's autobiographical alter-ego Henry Chinaski, Ham on Rye, out of sequence. As the origin story of Chinaski and Bukowski, covering the author's childhood and adolescence, that book was very dark in tone and changed my perspective of Bukowski's work from there on. I couldn't help but think about the relevance of that book when I picked up my thin new copy of Bukowski's second novel, the follow-up to his seminal debut Post-Office. Somewhat against my expectations, what I found with Factotum was a much calmer, much more laid-back novel than I was perhaps expecting, and a novel that follows on from the deadbeat tone of Post Office to expand upon a compelling character shuffling his way through life. 

Like Bukowki's later novel Women, Factotum is a book thematically revolving around its title; that is referring to a person who makes a living through a variety of menial, uninteresting tasks- describing this version of Henry Chinaski to a tee. Though Factotum was Bukowski's second book following Post Office, chronologically in terms of the life of Henry Chinaski it's really a prequel to it (and as such a sequel to Ham on Rye). Set in 1944, the novel begins as Chinaski has been rejected from the World War II draft and is estranged from his family (who he tries to reconnect with during the book without success). He needs a job, and is willing to do anything for beer money. Unfortunately for him his personality just isn't cut out for success as a robot, and so he's quickly fired from every pointless job he gets, almost as fast as he gets them. There isn't even much malice in this, Chinaski accepts his fate, moves on, and then does it again.

 It's the repetition-of the plot that made me compare this to Women, but the full-on hedonistic version of Chinaski I saw in that book is still in development here. In Factotum Chinaski is able to hold on to a couple of relationships for far longer than I expect from him, which gave the book a sense of romance. I certainly didn't feel the same sense of distaste I sometimes felt for the character in his treatment of other people, and this lightened the tone. To be fully honest I found Factotum to be more lightweight reading than every other Bukowski work I've read. At barely two-hundred pages it's a short read anyway, but I sped through it faster than I'd expected. In this regard it felt less cutting edge than, say Ham on Rye, perhaps less poignant, feeling more like a continuation of the themes of Post Office than anything particularly new or character-defining. On the other hand, it's probably for the same reasons that I found Factotum to be the funniest Bukowski book yet, as his mastery of one-liners shone through.

It probably coloured my opinion that I watched the 2005 film adaptation of Factotum shortly after finishing the book. In the film, Matt Dillon interprets Henry Chinaski as a very aloof, direct character who flows through his series of hirings and firings without losing his cool. There's a sense of lowered expectations, of submission to the uncontrollable forces of established society which does reflect the book, but seems to fail in capturing the poetic spirit of the character. I did greatly enjoy Factotum as a novel, since Bukowski's mastery of his own down and out prose style is constantly sublime and highly readable, so it's by the author's own standards that I think Factotum isn't quite as good as Post Office, Women or Ham on Rye, as I don't think it expanded upon the character as much. It's still elite quality twentieth century fiction though, since Charles Bukowski is such an incredibly talented writer that it's hard to compare him to anyone but himself.

Charles Bukowski- Women

Women

Virgin

 Charles Bukowski

1978

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

“I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn't dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren't thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.”

While I normally find myself spacing out works by my favourite authors, trying to extend my enjoyment, I enjoyed the last book I read by Charles Bukowski so much that it didn't take me long to pick up the other book of his sat in my to-read pile. My last encounter with Bukowski and his Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's fictional self-projection, was to read about the story of his youth and young adulthood; easily my favourite work by the author yet, Ham on Rye. Stylistically, Ham on Rye is typical Bukowski, but through its layered, rich narrative I found it to be even better; not simply within the context of Ham on Rye, but in the wider reaches of Bukowski's entire bibliography as it crucially builds a backdrop for his unique style of narration. It enabled me to look back at what I'd previously read by the author and gain a new, greater appreciation for it, and when it came to looking at my next full-length Bukowski novel of choice I'm pretty sure it made that a lot better too.

Published just two years before Ham on Rye, Charles Bukowki's Women is the third in his series of semi (or pseudo?) autobiographical novels starring the aforementioned Chinaski. In previous novels Post Office and Factotum (which I'm yet to read, shamefully) Chinaski was, at best, a complete low-life failure drinking, gambling and whoring his way through the dregs of society with no thoughts of self- improvement. Women, however, shows some of the drastic changes in Chinaski's later life at fifty-plus years after he becomes a nationally successful and very well-respected poet, while also focusing heavily on the things that don't really change for him whatsoever; the drinking, gambling and whoring. Like the rest of Bukowski's bibliography it's a completely uncensored voyage through alcoholic debauchery (although, it must be said, not a drugged-up one of the William Burroughs kind).

 

The thing that really stood out to me from this book that helped it stand out as a particularly enjoyable read within the chronology of the character was the somewhat mellowing change in Chinaski's personality, particularly in light of the psychopathic deviant of adolescence. Now in his late fifties, Chinaski's most obvious traits are still there in spades. As the title suggests, he's a rampant womaniser, the main theme of the book as he drifts from woman to woman like a deranged Casanova, and he's still very capable of furious anger, but this time, to me at least, there seemed a stronger impression of despair and shame with each failed relationship, each lurid indiscretion. Though Bukowski's fame makes it much easier for him to attract new women, his conscious grows with age and his body, ravaged by alcohol, becomes more decrepit and pathetic.

Maybe that's something to do with Bukowki's identification of himself with the Chinaski character. Bukowki's creation, control and development of his alter-ego must have been a very careful one, in terms of creating the image and atmosphere of a blurred window into a real past. Separating the truth of Bukowski's life from his presentation of this fictional one is kind of a fool's game at this point, especially for me, but I do think Women is in some part an attempt by Bukowski to repair some of the potential damage to his own image, so closely is it associated with his character. The fact that Chinaski is here roughly the same age as Bukowski suggests to me that this is the closest meeting of fact and fiction yet. With so many years removed from Chinaski/Bukowski's tumultuous youth, much (though by no means all) of the sheer aggression of the character has been calmed, or at least merged with his unending hunger for more women.

All in all, though not as enjoyable as Ham on Rye or Post Office to me, and certainly a little bit too long for its content, Women is still an alternative American classic with perfect stylistic prose. Perhaps best read after you've already encountered earlier Bukowski, it continues the development of a unique and unforgettable character that mixes reality and fiction to create a suspence of disbelief that adds an extra sharp edge to the sometimes unbelievable onslaught of self-destructive, decadent behaviour.

Charles Bukowski- Ham on Rye

Ham on Rye

Canongate

 Charles Bukowski

1982

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

“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.”

It's taken me longer to realise this than it really should have, but Chuck Bukowski is an absolute five-star master of prose fiction, in my mind equal to the likes of Joseph Conrad, George Orwell and (my pick for his most similarly talented contemporary) Kurt Vonnegut. I should have recognised this earlier, having first read his most famous work, Post Office, but, in my defense Bukowki's style is resolutely inapproachable, disgustingly grimy and in-your-face at every opportunity. I like to think it was a tough nut to crack.

Ham on Rye, his fourth novel, again brings back semi-autobiographical lead character Henry Chinaski. In  prior novels the reader viewed the adventures of Chinaski as a grown man, struggling with the vices of life in the underbelly of the big city. Heavily stylistic, those books were full of potentially depressing, soul-destroying insight into the world from the lowest point of view possible, but personally I felt that Bukowski's unmistakable prose style and the incessant deluge of down-and-out plot developments made it hard to look past the jet black humour and see a more rounded character beyond. Ham on Rye is the novel that addresses that, and as a result both stands out as a piece of individual brilliance while putting the character as a whole into a larger context.

Reading this novel about the youth and young manhood of Chinaski had two consecutive effects for this reader. The first, from a critical standpoint, was that Bukowski manages to make the twisted, antisocial and incredibly bitter, but perhaps two-dimensional drinker of his early works make perfect sense in this fuller context. The second, very powerful effect this had for me was to remove a large portion of the black humorous tone and replace it with an alternative, recognisable realism. This is, to be somewhat cliche, an origin story. Much of it is depressing or disgusting when you stop to think about it for a moment; Henry's parents are abusive, mentally and physically, and through their fearful efforts to control a child of changing times and turn him into a model slave, they create a monster.

Bukowski or Chinaski?

Bukowski charts the growth of Chinaski in a fairly organised manner, smoothly charting the key incidents of his life through junior high school up until his first employment. As a piece of character writing it is incredible, as Chinaski constantly grows with his experiences to become more intelligent and self-aware with age, but with that also more bitter and twisted. With his blunt, deceptively simple style, Bukowski describes key character-developing moments in Chinaski's life, many of them completely obscene; heavily focusing on sex, violence and alcohol, as Chinaski goes through perhaps the worst puberty imaginable. Ostracised and abused, the growth of Chinaski into a deadbeat beer-dependent creature is remarkable, and surely must be uncomfortable reading for those of a lighter disposition. The keys to the consistent, enveloping tone are the unspoken blurred lines between real life and fantasy. I haven't read a Bukowski biography, something I think made the effect stronger, as the outlying concept that this life was, to some extent, a real one projected by the author into this version helps empower the novel.

Though this book is nasty and downbeat to the extent where I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, it is a remarkable piece of art. Bukowki's mastery of his own particular style has been honed to perfection, and the depth of character work he puts into Ham on Rye results in one of the finest novels I've read; another negative take on the American dream following Fitzgerald, Burroughs, Vonnegut and the like, joining them in the company of the culture's greatest contributors.

Charles Bukowski- Tales of Ordinary Madness

Tales of Ordinary Madness

Virgin Press

Charles Bukowski

1983

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

“to ask them to legalize pot is something like asking them to put butter on the handcuffs before they place them on you, something else is hurting you - that's why you need pot or whiskey, or whips and rubber suits, or screaming music turned so fucking loud you can't think, or madhouses or mechanical cunts or 162 baseball games in a season. or vietnam or israel or the fear of spiders. your love washing her yellow false teeth in the sink before you screw.” 

After the disappointment of The Face of Another, my next choice of reading material was an intentionally safe one; picking from three Charles Bukowski options and coming out with another collection of out-there articles, in a similar vain to Notes of a Dirty Old Man. Like Notes..., Tales of Ordinary Madness collects a range of short pieces originally published in magazines and underground newspapers, from 1967-1975, with no stated theme or narrative in common than Bukowski's individually brilliant explosive style.

Though Bukowksi is probably more well-known in the twenty-first century for his poetry and novels like Post Office, his bibliography of miscellanea is extensive; as someone who struggles to hold his brain together long enough to compose a four paragraph review of somebody else's work Bukowski is both my hero and antithesis. As such each of his many collected volumes have a parade of timeless essays and short fictions to present, and Tales of Ordinary Madness is probably my favourite of those I've yet read. Bukowski deviates from short stories to essays to self-portraying thinly veiled memoirs with equal ease, and this collection offers a good variety in style, thankfully preventing the intensity of thought Bukowksi presents from becoming overwhelming.

If you've experienced Bukowski before then you should know what to expect from his style and subjects, and if you haven't then this book would surely be a great introduction. The blurb on the book cover describes him as 'the godfather of lowlife literature', which is absolutely accurate. Each of his main characters (all of whom are essentially just variations upon the author himself) deal in the most disgusting, debased, drug-infested and morally-corrupt circumstances, as he presents an America drowning in its own debauchery. There is no happy ending, sometimes not even a plot, but Bukowski's narration bounces electrically from point to point, his vitriol unstoppable as he observes the decaying wreck of a once great empire. His humour is so black that it's impossibly to accurately determine what is and isn't a joke; my favourite story Rape! Rape! demonstrating that in the most offensive way possible.

In conclusion, obviously Charles Bukowski isn't for everyone, and if you're the type easily offended through text then he's clearly not for you. For anybody else looking for an uncensored artistic rant at the world through the medium of uncompromisingly vile short segments, if Hunter S. Thompson's not hardcore enough for you, then Chuck Bukowki's the man you need. He'll shake your brain up and make you enjoy it.

Charles Bukowski- Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Virgin

 Charles Bukowski

1969

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

"no pain means the end of feeling; each of our joys is a bargain with the devil

***

the difference between Art and Life is that Art is more bearable."

After exposing myself to the drug that is Bukowski for the first time with the seminal Post Office, I knew I'd probably love everything he'd ever written. Naturally it took me about a year to start reading more, but by god I've done it, and here's a hastily written review to prove it. I've got three other Bukowski novels in the cabinet now, so I can safely predict that I'll finish reading the complete Bukowski in about forty-two years.

As has been shown here, I'm a fan of reading various collected editions of shorter works by a favourite author, like Orwell, Thompson and Sir Terry, for example, and there's something about the unrelenting power and pace of Bukowski's prose that I felt would make Notes of a Dirty Old Man a memorable read at the very least. One of a few Bukowski compilations, this edition compiles fifty-seven editions of his column published in L.A.'s' short-lived tabloid Open City, published from '67 to '69. Each of the short articles is at least as surreal as the previous one, and I can only imagine and dream of reading it in the original weekly installments. Reading them consecutively as they're published here is almost an overwhelming experience.

As he is widely known for, Bukowski uses his page space to tell kaleidoscopic visions of his real life experiences, with snarling, aggressive narration. Many of the stories are almost completely obscene, and vary in their narrative coherency. On a few separate occasions Bukowski proclaims his disdain for the work of some of his contemporaries, particularly William Burroughs, though it was quickly apparent to me that much of Bukowski's presentation resembles the style of Naked Lunch, in their bizarre odysseys of semi-recognisable beatnik culture mired in surreal expressions of obscenity.

Bukowski is at heart a poet, and much of my enjoyment of this book comes from the power and rhythm of each of his sentences, where sanity is sacrificed for art. As such I read this book in small portions, finding it works better to savour a briefer taste of the strangeness. It was still over quickly though, as I find Bukowski strangely comfortable to read despite the aggression and downbeat exultation of twisted hedonism.

I think I've come over a bit wordy today, I might need a lie down. 

Charles Bukowski- Post Office

Post Office

Virgin Publishing

Charles Bukowski
1971 

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

“I wasn't much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world or nothing.”

Charles Bukowsi's iconic alt-American classic semi-autobiographical novel is, in the nicest way possible, a book that threw its similarities and influences at me from every page. Post Office might be a stand-out piece of infamous 70's Americana, but it fits perfectly within the three-dimensional super puzzle of 20th century US literary history. Post Office is most often and probably most accurately genre identified as a late peace of Beatnik writing; following in the trails of luminaries like Allen Ginsberg, or Jack Kerouac and On the Road in certain stylistic ways; detailing the exploits of his main character Henry Chinaski through a hazy first-person narrative crossing over ten years in the blink of two-hundred pages, giving only as many details as he feels like giving.

Going back to F. Scott Fitzgerald and flowing out of the second world war, then the paranoid, perceived self-loathing of the 1950's (Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit), and finally the explosion of drug culture of the 60's, Henry Chinaski lives from day to day on the bottom rung of society. His job as a postal worker is dull, depressing, and unfair, and so Chinaski lives in the throng of booze, betting, and women; just totally embracing the baser things in life to make it bearable; it's not exactly William Burroughs and Naked Lunch in style, and you can't really call it straight-up drug literature but there are plenty of similarities to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, published in the same year as Post Office, as both Henry Chinaski and Raoul Duke exist as larger-than-life character extensions that get through life by ignoring as much of it as possible.

The story and the mood of Post Office (disgruntled lower-class bum says 'fuck you' to the world around him, gets through his terrible job through women and booze) fits perfectly for the time and counter-culture world around it, but it's the sheer style of Bukowski's writing that appeals to so many people. It kind of reminded me in many ways of one of my favourite authors, post-modernist genius Kurt Vonnegut (something like Breakfast of Champions), in that the prose is absolutely full of character, oozing out of every line, and the dialogue even more so. Some of it is incredibly blunt, blurring the line between heroic rebellion and drunken stupidity but with an unrelenting conviction of belief.

Ultimately I really enjoyed Post Office, as my first exposure to Bukowski it's thrown me down the path of another bibliography. I must say upon first read I didn't enjoy his work as much as Thompson or Vonnegut but there's clearly more to Bukowski than meets the eye, and I get the feeling he's not the kind of author of whom you can get a full grip on the personality of straight away, but who might require taking another look at to properly get the idea. But already it's pretty clear that this is the work of one cool mother.