Let’s go to the races, the Art Museum, the boxing matches. Let’s just lay around and make love and take walks and talk a little. “After dinner or lunch or whatever it was-with my crazy 12-hour night, I was no longer sure what was what-I said, “Look, baby, I’m sorry, but don’t you realize that this job is driving me crazy? Look, let’s give it up. It’s his very first novel, written at the age of 50. After a lot of scrolling, I found one intriguing expert from the book “Post Office” by Charles Bukowski. If you’re interested to find out about my novel, there are plenty of reader reviews here.Off lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time on Pinterest looking for quotes/authors/write-ups to get inspired, or maybe I am just trying to hide from all the pending tasks? I don’t know. So I hope some of Bukowski’s fluidity has worn off.Īs ever, if you want to read more of my musings, then click here to subscribe to this site. It is instead to say that every bit of artifice is entirely hidden in the loose first person ramblings of an adolescent who became a violent drunk in a brutal world.Īs it happens I’m currently writing in the first person about a drunk, albeit a non-violent one and in a less brutal world. I have no doubt that he did, despite his famously fast writing style and refusal to edit his work. That is not to say he didn’t plan and aim for effect. Because in Bukowski at what I’ve seen of his best, the narrative feels entirely natural with no artistic forethought at all. I would be too deliberate, too artistic as a result. And here’s the thing: written by many writers, the switches into violence and out to innocence would clearly be planned, structured, precisely placed into order to give the maximum effect. And it’s that straightforwardness that gives the emotional weight to the violence that follows.

There’s no fanfare about the use of a young child’s under-the-table point of view in the opening paragraphs – it’s matter-of-fact, as Bukowski seems always to be. This chronology gives the strange impression that Bukowski’s writing deteriorated as he wrote through Hank’s life – which is to say that the writing in ‘Ham on Rye’ is mostly very good indeed.

It’s a later novel, with the same protagonist as ‘Post Office’, and dealing with his earlier life. And so last night when I got home from holiday tired and wanting to hide from the world, I pulled out ‘Ham on Rye’.

Post office bukowski review