Well written but documenting the familiar
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This was very easy to read and was well written but I can't understand all the praise.
As someone who has worked rubbish jobs, drunk too much and been hungover too often as well living in short term rented accommodation this didn't really tell me anything I didn't know and didn't give an insight into why people live like this. Good read but documenting the ordinary is never going to be extraordinary.
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? a metaphor for human existence
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what do you get from reading about Chinaski's paranoid and conscienceless approach to his pretty grim life? - well, for a start, your own impresses you as being worthwhile, you feel ( or decide to feel ) ok about yourself. you only vaguely know or know of someone like Chinaski. you don't exactly enjoy being a voyeur to his startling, brutally crude,constricted existence, but he will drag projections of various sorts out of most of you. why we read this is fascinating in itself. Maybe he is a metaphor for us being here 'just because we are'!
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simple and brilliant
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Every Bukowski novel you are guaranteed to have a good time reading it and this one is no different. The simplicity of the writing allows his soul to shine through. I love easy reads that are also affecting and this is one of the finest examples.
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Excellent
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While it is very much the norm in modern literature to focus on the self as the central theme of the writer's work, the novelist choses this motif at his own peril. Bukowski's grasp somewhat outstrips his reach; this is because his talent to describe a reality is so much more powerful than the material that he chooses to create that reality. Very few writers since Hemingway can set the scene and paint the stage with such remarkable economy of the written word. I see the main difference between a great writer and a good one (and Bukowski is a very good one)is the scope and breadth his material. But Hemingway's world was much larger while Bukowski binds himself too closely in his nutshell. He takes us into strange fields filled with enchanting flowers, only to describe, in breathtaking detail, a blade of grass. Bukowski's fearless approach to truth as a writer comes from (what one can only assume) is his relative poverty as a human being...however well he reveals to us in this novel the transcendental beauty of his blade of grass, we long to be able devour the scents and absorb the sunlight which we can only sense is just outside the writer's realm of experience!! I would also highly recommend reading Tino Georgiou's bestseller--The Fates--if you missed it!
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A modern catch 22.
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Although less compelling and lighter on the soul that Ham on Rye, Bukowski's Post Office is still an excellent read. The themes of this novel are the pointlessness and arbitrarinous of everyday life, the misanthropy of human nature, set against an ever-present backdrop of alcoholism and self abuse.
Post Office makes both sad and hilarious reading, similar in vein to Heller's classic, Catch 22. Whilst depressing and dark, this novel is full of black humour and a wonderful sense of the ridiculous. When reading Post Office sometimes it was difficult to know whether to laugh or to cry.
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