“No, I only write after it gets dark. I can never write in the day”
The fifty years old man said to Lydia.
When I started reading literature seriously, I was already mature enough. But I knew since a very young age that books get into your mind. As a child, I was a comic book lover. And those comic- heroes used to get into my head; I was behaving like them when I was alone. You should always read good books. That was a piece of advice. I followed it to date.
I think after reading this book, I broke my literary abstinence. I admonished myself. This book was my introduction to Charles Bukowski. I had not heard this name earlier and nobody recommended this book to me. I stumbled across it by chance. And From the very first page, I was welcomed with intemperance. There was no restraint! So much vulgar slang!
I will not recommend this book to anyone. It’s highly adult in content from the very beginning. And it’s monstrous in moral pursuit and licentious in delivery too. There is a lot of dope and booze and lechery all around. Venereal depictions and misogynistic prose are almost on every other page! Repeating the same thing again and again! Alcoholism, dipsomania, and lots of rumpy-pumpy! Only the name of the woman was different. The protagonist Hank Chinaski was the same. This book is porn on paper.
In the beginning, a woman teaches a 50-year-old man the trick, mumbling to herself,
“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks!”
Even in this sort of book, I found a poetic paragraph to share with, you must know that Hank Chinaski is also a poet, apart from alcohol and women he writes poems in between.
“I think you deserve some love”, She said.
“I had a dream about you. I opened your chest like a cabinet. It had doors and when I opened the door as I saw all kinds of soft things inside you- teddy bears, tiny fuzzy animals, all these soft cuddly things. Then I had a dream about this other man. He walked up to me and handed me some pieces of paper. He was a writer. I took the pieces of paper and looked at them and the pieces of paper had cancer. His writing had cancer. I go by my dreams. You deserve some love.”
After finishing the book, (No, not after finishing, I started searching even after the first two chapters) I searched about the author and came to know that he is very popular. People read him and his books are bestsellers. I also came to know that Hank Chinaski is the alter ego of the author. So my stance will be a bit different then.
This novel was published in 1978. He worked in a post office and the moment he left the job there within a short period of time he wrote his first book the title was “post office”. All writers are made by life. They do not become such on their own. Their subject matter is prepared by life and thus they just write, mechanically, unintended, or maybe unemotionally. As Bukowski briefly explained somewhere, that he had one of the two choices – “stay in the post office and go crazy … or stay out and play at writer and starve.” He further clarified that he decided to starve.
Now finally, Though I will remain a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, regarding my mandate on the content of this book, yet I will utter an indispensable fact in the end that will do justice to Charles Bukowski.
The fact is that this man knows how to write a book. Look at those short sentences. He does not use any ornamentation. No complicated word. He says shit a shit. He is honest in a savagely violent way. He does not care about anything. He produces fun. Boisterous merriment. He is too filthy. Repetitive. Afar from my own self-inflicted moral ground. Yet I read the book completely. So those who want to become writers should go and check these capabilities of the author once. He knows how to bind a reader even if he has nothing to offer!
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