Charles Bukowski Post Office (1971)
To begin at something of a tangent, I recall being told that no-one actually reads Bukowski - or William Burroughs for that matter - but we tell people we do so in order to appear sophisticated, or because we think we're lush when we really aren't or something of that sort. I was told this by a person on a forum dedicated to Doctor Who, the children's television programme, and it is, I suppose, typical of the sort of bollocks rattling around in the heads of those who can't cope with anything but adventures, one after the other, an endless fucking line of thrills, scrapes, and companions captured for the sake of shifting the story along towards yet another ballsachingly familiar conclusion. I mention this only in the hope of annoying anyone reading who might subscribe to this view, and in the hope of annoying them so much that it causes them to grow the fuck up and invest at least some of their time in something besides adventures, because we really, really, really, really need as many thinking adults in the world as we can get right now.
I first read Post Office many years ago back when I was working for Royal Mail. I wouldn't say I loved it, because it isn't the sort of book you love, but it is nevertheless a great book which left me with mixed feelings over how something written in the American sixties so precisely described my own working conditions in the English nineties - mixed feelings incorporating equal measures of depression and satisfaction, specifically satisfaction at having my suspicions confirmed regarding the universal experience of bullshit. Reading it again in 2019 is interesting from the point of view that although I'm no longer in the job, I now live in America and some of the other details have accordingly come into sharper focus.
Bukowski keeps it plain and simple, just the things you need to know but assembled in such a way as to resonate with a more or less common experience which ends up saying something arguably more profound than that which is given in the text. This is probably why dunces of the kind described in the first paragraph don't get Bukowski, because they lack either the common experience or the imagination to work with anything which isn't directly spoon fed to them as adventure.
To be fair, most people have Bukowski all wrong, also meaning those who need this to be considered transgressive literature because our man likes a pint and has sex with ladies. This probably accounts for his receiving notice in the same open mouthed breath as William Burroughs. The two of them never met, although they once stayed in the same hotel. Burroughs sent a message inviting Bukowski over for a drink, and Bukowski declined because he preferred to drink alone and didn't see what the two of them could possibly have to talk about, the only common ground being their shared disregard of authority. Burroughs dissects power structures, even proposes solutions up to a point, where Bukowski simply reports, tells it how it is, and we can take what we like from that because it's mostly bullshit - even the good bits, those details which might seem worth remembering.
Where the transgressives have it wrong is that this isn't even nihilism. Like I said, Bukowski keeps it plain and simple, the unsteady testimony of a drunk, but a gentle drunk, laced with warmth and humour in the face of horrible reality but without the wasted effort of cracking jokes, or any other ploy used by lesser writers in pursuit of your sympathy. Post Office probably isn't a great novel in the sense of Mountainhead by New Juche being a great novel, but it doesn't try to sell us any bullshit, which is a rare thing, and is therefore good enough.
To begin at something of a tangent, I recall being told that no-one actually reads Bukowski - or William Burroughs for that matter - but we tell people we do so in order to appear sophisticated, or because we think we're lush when we really aren't or something of that sort. I was told this by a person on a forum dedicated to Doctor Who, the children's television programme, and it is, I suppose, typical of the sort of bollocks rattling around in the heads of those who can't cope with anything but adventures, one after the other, an endless fucking line of thrills, scrapes, and companions captured for the sake of shifting the story along towards yet another ballsachingly familiar conclusion. I mention this only in the hope of annoying anyone reading who might subscribe to this view, and in the hope of annoying them so much that it causes them to grow the fuck up and invest at least some of their time in something besides adventures, because we really, really, really, really need as many thinking adults in the world as we can get right now.
I first read Post Office many years ago back when I was working for Royal Mail. I wouldn't say I loved it, because it isn't the sort of book you love, but it is nevertheless a great book which left me with mixed feelings over how something written in the American sixties so precisely described my own working conditions in the English nineties - mixed feelings incorporating equal measures of depression and satisfaction, specifically satisfaction at having my suspicions confirmed regarding the universal experience of bullshit. Reading it again in 2019 is interesting from the point of view that although I'm no longer in the job, I now live in America and some of the other details have accordingly come into sharper focus.
Bukowski keeps it plain and simple, just the things you need to know but assembled in such a way as to resonate with a more or less common experience which ends up saying something arguably more profound than that which is given in the text. This is probably why dunces of the kind described in the first paragraph don't get Bukowski, because they lack either the common experience or the imagination to work with anything which isn't directly spoon fed to them as adventure.
To be fair, most people have Bukowski all wrong, also meaning those who need this to be considered transgressive literature because our man likes a pint and has sex with ladies. This probably accounts for his receiving notice in the same open mouthed breath as William Burroughs. The two of them never met, although they once stayed in the same hotel. Burroughs sent a message inviting Bukowski over for a drink, and Bukowski declined because he preferred to drink alone and didn't see what the two of them could possibly have to talk about, the only common ground being their shared disregard of authority. Burroughs dissects power structures, even proposes solutions up to a point, where Bukowski simply reports, tells it how it is, and we can take what we like from that because it's mostly bullshit - even the good bits, those details which might seem worth remembering.
Where the transgressives have it wrong is that this isn't even nihilism. Like I said, Bukowski keeps it plain and simple, the unsteady testimony of a drunk, but a gentle drunk, laced with warmth and humour in the face of horrible reality but without the wasted effort of cracking jokes, or any other ploy used by lesser writers in pursuit of your sympathy. Post Office probably isn't a great novel in the sense of Mountainhead by New Juche being a great novel, but it doesn't try to sell us any bullshit, which is a rare thing, and is therefore good enough.
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