Welcome to Bukowski world, the irreverent writer par excellence, the author of visceral books that spread bile throughout all areas of society (sorry if it was too "visual"). Beyond approaching this genius with meme quotes and with which to recover his ingenious visions of the most mundane existence, the final reading of his works is raw life inoculated into vein.
Because Charles Bukowski He was a temperamental writer who one fine day decided to write what he wanted and which ended up curdling in a multitude of readers who ended up worshiping him for his nihilistic rebellion, for his fatalistic touch and for his way of revisiting the tragic life under the prism of a humor caustic.
Literature needs figures like that of this author committed to nothingness, to denial, to rebellion just for the sake of it, to disenchantment. And despite all this, Bukowski's characters offer brilliant glimpses of humanity when from time to time they confess that they also feel, raising those feelings to the highest level, like one who spits at the sky and waits undaunted for the only possible response coming from a calm sky and subjected to inertia ...
There were not many novels that this writer wrote, and thanks to that it is easy for me to stop in his bibliography and establish those three best books.
But first, if you are already familiar with the great Bukowski, I would like to invite you to consult some other titles, special editions, compilations of poetry as nihilistic and hedonistic as his prose, volumes that combine or that bring one of the most casual bibliographies in the history of Literature:
And now, yes, let's go with me selection of novels by Bukowski...
3 recommended novels from Charles Bukowski
Postman
Like almost all his work, the protagonist is him. Working as a postman was a trip to the grotesque way for Charles. It must have been extremely interesting to see a half-drunk postman wandering the streets, exposing his anti-philosophy of life to anyone who came across him or who tried to maintain a minimal cordial conversation. In this novel we are told a fragment of the life of his alter ego Chinaski.
Summary: En Postman describes the twelve years he was employed in a seedy Los Angeles post office. The book ends when Chinaski / Bukowski leaves the miserable security of his job, at age 49, to dedicate himself exclusively to writing. And he writes Postman, his first novel.
Bukowski He was one of the most important American writers of the counterculture during the 60s and 70s of the XNUMXth century, a veteran who outlived all his generation companions, always maintaining a cynical and combative attitude.
Factotum
In this novel we go back even further into the life of the genius of the most prosaic prose. A work to unravel the inner nature of this writer as great as he is extravagant.
Summary: In this autobiographical novel from his younger years, the author describes the life of his alter ego Henry Chinaski jumping from one job to another, all sordid, tough, meaningless, getting drunk to death, with the obsession to fuck, trying to materialize his Writer's life and offers us a brutally funny and melancholy horrified vision of the work ethic, of how it bends the "soul" of men.
It has been said that Bukowski with his laconic prose, terse and forceful as an uppercut is the atrocious novelist of the great urban jungle, of the disinherited, the prostitutes, the drunks, the human waste of the American Dream.
Pulp
One of his few works in which Chinaski does not appear to give a good account of the insignificance of living. In this case, the author takes us to Los Angeles to give the world of celluloid and entertainment a good shake.
Summary: In Los Angeles there is a very strange rumor. It is said that a certain Céline, who prowls the bookstores inspecting the competition and looking for first editions of Faulkner, would be nothing more and nothing less than Louis Ferdinand, who would not have died in 1961 in Meudon.
Nick Belane, a very unintelligent private detective, is in charge of finding out the truth. And who wants to know? A very fatal lady, perhaps the most fatal of all, who does not accept that Céline could have escaped her deadly charm. But suddenly the work season has turned very good for Nick and he has several more business on his hands: finding the Red Sparrow, who is not the Maltese Falcon's grandson for a certain John Barton, and finding out if Cindy, Jack's wife Bass, cheats on your husband.
But, as Raymond Chandler has thoroughly demonstrated, all a detective's cases always tie up with one another, and a considerable mess will ensue between Cindy and Céline. "Pulp", Bukowski's latest novel, is a parody and homage to all the "pulp fictions" that have been on paper, and a real, literary and bloody "pulp fiction" in its own right, which resorts to tragedy and humor, literature and keys to the purest and harshest reality, the real and the surreal.
Other recommended books Charles Bukowski
Hollywood
Hollywood experiences sound like something like metacinema to us. Actors, screenwriters and other breeds living lives bent by themselves, becoming actors in their script. From there any story writes itself between the parodic and the satirical. All this covered by a patina or tinsel that Chinaski is in charge of stridently sanding down to the chipping of a reality that is falling apart.
Henry Chinaski has always been on the warpath, never lowering his guard against the "establishment" and its infinite tentacles. But in Hollywood it will not be easy for him: John Pinchot, a crazed film director, insists on bringing his youthful stories to the screen, that is, the autobiography of an inveterate alcoholic.
Chinaski is wary of the project, though he reluctantly agrees to write the film's script. And here the real problems begin. Bukowski tells in this book the experiences of his alter ego Chinaski during the filming of the movie Barfly, directed by Barbet Schroeder and played by Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway.
A sarcastic, acid and corrosive vision of the behind the scenes of Hollywood in which curious and eccentric characters parade: producers, hacks, artists of everything imaginable, ghost executives, journalists... A harsh world where everything revolves to the beat of the sacrosanct dollar, which is paradoxically, the only way to realize the most subversive dreams and the most crazed companies.