Bukowski Isn't Passe

I just finished Factotum, the first time I’ve read Bukowski since I was 15. Wow - It still rules, totally different to my adolescent memories of his work though. I guess when you’re a teenager what stands out are the most lurid moments, and the descriptions of beer induced diarrhea, of diarrhea on boxers, on bed sheets etc. All of those elements are still there, and are great, but as a wizened, mature adult I liked the book even more.

Firstly, I had really overlooked how funny Bukowski is. His Chinaski character has this wit - a kind of lonely wit, as nobody ever laughs at his cracks. Factotum details a series of dead end jobs that Chinaski gets fired from, and each interview he has to fake his dedication, producing exchanges like:
“Why do you want to work in a ladies’ dress shop?”
“I’ve always liked ladies in ladies’ dresses.”

There’s a point when he gets rich ripping off his workmates, taking their cash for bets and not placing them – he knows their bets are bad and uses their money to place his own. He starts drinking fine whiskey, wearing expensive bright yellow shirts, and green pants with white stripes.

“Mr Big-Time Horseplayer!” his girlfriend mocks him.
“I give you soul,” he responds. “I give you wisdom and light and music and a bit of laughter. Also, I am the worlds greatest horseplayer.”
“Horse shit!”
“No, horseplayer.”



It's his sense of the absurd; how he’ll put his foreman, the size of a dwarf, in a headlock, when he gets fired; how he takes on the job of writing the libretto of an opera about a man who wants to be the emporer of San Francisco. Then there’s his drunken babbling, that never receives a response, like this:

“Someday,” I told Jan, “when they demonstrate that the world has four dimensions instead of just three, a man will be able to go for a walk and just disappear. No burial, no tears, no illusions, no heaven or hell. People will be sitting around and they’ll say, ‘what happened to George?’ And somebody will say, “Well, I don’t know. He said he was going out for a pack of cigarettes.’”