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It had been years since I last read anything by Bukowski. His truth, so dirty and vile, I had missed it. I had missed Buk, my favorite drinking buddy.
"South of No North". In other words, nowhere. This is the ultimate destination of the losers who populate the stories of Charles Bukowski. Outcasts, drunks, inept, earthly devils, pieces of shit, desperates, whores, and desperate whores. All in motion. All still. All in a motionless movement. All like him, Hank Chinaski (the writer's alter ego), lost in a glass, or rather, in a bottle. Drowned in an empty sea, but always in a storm: life.
This is what Uncle Buk talks about in his stories: life. Shit and life. And often the two things are perfectly superimposable ("this is how the world ended, not with an atomic bomb, but with shit shit shit").
One of the most experienced writers, and who lived life the most. One moment raw, cynical, and ruthless. The moment after, so sensitive that it pulls out pieces of your soul. True. True to the core.
Erotomaniac. Alcoholic. Hardened gambler. One of the many failures of this infamous world. With only one blessing: writing like a god. An unparalleled sense of dialogue, even if the themes are often redundant, or there's hardly any action. In this stasis of rarefied and unhealthy air, lies a universe of fascinating filth like few others (even if this work doesn't reach the masterpieces "Tales of Ordinary Madness" and "Factotum").
Human desolation has never been so real. So, sadly and splendidly, real.
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