The Most Beautiful Woman in Town

Charles Bukowski The Most Beautiful Woman in Town (1983)
Here's another after the fact assemblage of short stories Chuck fired off to assorted magazines of vaguely literary persuasion, possibly without remembering that he'd done so in a few cases. Most are probably autobiographical, but not all; and a couple of them could be counted as science-fiction if you felt inclined to do so, even if the speculative details of sex robots and Adolf Hitler mind-swapping with the president tend to be overshadowed by the familiar themes of booze, fucking, and hangovers. For someone who, according to his numbskull critics, only ever wrote one thing and wrote it over and over and over, there's a lot of variation here, and thankfully none of it in terms of quality - as has been the case with other, similar collections of the man's peripheral works. As usual, it's hardly pretty, and there are a couple of instances of surprising brutality, even for Bukowski, and yet everything is delivered with equal emphasis, no emotional bias, as the even drone of daily life in a hangover of existence, warts and all, and with the sort of pathos and even tenderness which few other writer's ever quite achieved. Each time you read Bukowski you learn something important, or if you don't learn it then you are reminded of it; and if you still don't get it, then you're probably doing it all wrong.