Buk's Novels
I completely agree. A terrible read. HOLLYWOOD, on the other hand, was a unexpected surprise. I put it right up there with FACTOTUM. Am I nuts?
Hollywood"”a terrific novel. Here's Bukowski finally able to relax and enjoy his success because of his recent financial windfalls, and making highly amusing comments about the falsity of the Hollywood scene itself: the making of
Barfly. There's so much to enjoy, but I particularly love the scene where he and "Linda" are house-hunting and supposedly come across one of Charles Manson's old haunts. Whether that story is literally true or not, Bukowski captures the hippy weirdness of the experience like the true master of the word. I can remember the thrill of reading this funny and masterful novel as it was hot off the press years ago, and it was a great read for me, as Bukowski was now in a higher tax bracket, yet still Bukowski, still drinking like a fish, with Linda trying to keep tabs on it, and writing without any outside pressure from the standpoint of having finally made his pot of gold.
I also put his marvelous collection of short stories,
Hot Water Music, in the same category of relaxed excellence as
Hollywood. Again, here's Bukowski writing with the additional clarity of having finally made it as a financially successful writer, and his imagination just soars with a combination of fanciful story lines, humor, bemusement, and a beautiful mastery of the language. It would be hard to imagine anything that could improve his choice of every word in either of these two works"”as good as anything he ever did, in my opinion.
Ham on Rye I place in a different writing category, a great work, and a deeply honest one in terms of portraying his formative years and his deeply troubled states of mind as a kid and young adult.
I'll pass on
Pulp, after having read it when it first came out... and Bukowski not seeming like himself in this parody of "bad writing"... but
Factotum is a great novel because it starts off with the deadening dullness, the sense of tedium and dead-end futility, of having no where else to turn than to go from menial job to job on the low end of the food chain. It captures so perfectly what it's like to survive such jobs for the sake of the dollar and yet somehow keep his dream of a creative life alive. I consider
Factotum his most universal work in that it captures the every man, Blue Collar life down to a T, in a way that anyone who can read at all can see themselves in it because of its amazingly basic, but emotionally evocative, stripped-down language.
To me,
Post Office and
Factotum are his most accessible novels, ones that anyone with any kind of life experience at all can understand and somehow feel better about their own future prospects or lack of them.
"”Poptop.
