The Bell Tolls for No One

June 15, 2015
Bukowski is an acquired taste, and this set of fiction stories from three sources—his underground newspaper column “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” short pornographic pieces written for adult magazines, and miscellaneous short stories, some previously unpublished—will do little to expand his readership. Bukowski’s world is hostile, full of runaway dysfunction, and populated by alcoholics, gamblers, adulterers, and abusers, all with few, if any, redeeming qualities. And to underscore the distance between these lives and the those of his readers, Bukowski’s characters come with no backstories and no elaborate psychologies; rather they are men and women motivated by unseen compulsions, simple boredom, and fatalistic unhappiness. It is Bukowski’s embrace of this world, his insistence on its validity if not its value, that makes him unique. Readers should be warned that many of the stories are difficult to read for their depiction of sadism and sexual violence. Still, Bukowski can be honest and direct, and he is capable of embedding meaningful observations in the most sordid of stories.

June 15, 2015
The uncollected gutbucket ramblings of the grand dirty old man of Los Angeles letters have been gathered in this characteristically filthy, funny compilation. Bukowski's autobiographical novels (More Notes of a Dirty Old Man, 2011, etc.) often read as a series of strung-together episodes and scatological anecdotes. So the brevity of the pieces collected here, some no more than two or three pages, suit Bukowski well. A majority of the stories appeared as the column "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" in the LA Free Press. Others, which ran in Oui and Hustler, represent perhaps the final gasp of a literary tradition that began in the 1950s and '60s when the raunchier skin magazines were open to work by established writers. To the uninitiated, Bukowski can seem off-puttingly vulgar. And while you can detect a wounded romantic beneath the Lothario, Bukowski's alter egos were not gents when it came to women. Best to think of his work as a series of dirty Road Runner cartoons in which Bukowski is the coyote taking one damn kick in the pants-front- and backside-after another. At its worst (the hijack fantasy "Fly the Friendly Skies"), Bukowski's sensibility is ugly and coarse. But when he is swinging, there is a companionable ease to his blunt, profane vernacular. Bukowski's gift was a sense for the raunchy absurdity of life, his writing a grumble that might turn into a belly laugh or a racking cough but that always throbbed with vital energy.

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