The genius of Charles Bukowski
Recently, I rediscovered the work of Charles Bukowski after many years. For those unfamiliar with Bukowski, he is one of the most popular novelists and poets ever to inhabit the American counter culture, with some of his works still considered classics and as popular today as they were when they were published and the man himself was still alive.
The book of his I picked up from the back of my bookshelf, Factotum, is a semi-autobiographical account of his years as a down and out itinerant worker in the 1940s, moving back and forth across the United States working in a series of deadening, menial and low wage jobs, sleeping in cheap hotels when he could afford the rent, or in parks, perennially drunk and involved in dysfunctional relationship after dysfunctional relationship with a variety of women. Adopting the alter ego Henry Chinaski in each of his classic semi-autobiographical novels: Post Office (1971); Factotum (1975); Women (1978); and Ham On Rye (1982), Bukowski’s genius was in articulating the deadening reality of working life in simple yet scintillating prose, while at the same time infusing his work with a scathing rejection of polite society and its stifling conventions.
