Charles Bukowski
Post Office

"I had only two alternatives - stay at the post office and go crazy... or leave and play at being a writer and starve. I decided to starve."

In this sentence, we find summarized the experience of Charles Bukowski as a postman: an experience that the author originally from Andernach tells us about in one of his most famous novels, "Post Office."

Bukowski shares his experience through the eyes of Henry Chinaski, an alcoholic and womanizing character, his well-known literary alter ego, and the protagonist of almost all his novels. In "Post Office" Chinaski accepts the job of a postman, believing it to be a simple job, a goldmine, since postmen do nothing but "slip their letters into mailboxes", also getting easy occasional sex. Starting to work, he is soon disappointed due to the routine and the rigid rules of the post office, rules that a character like Chinaski, that is, Bukowski himself, often fails to understand, inevitably ending up breaking them.

Indeed, in the novel, the post office becomes a symbol of society, with its rules, its rigidity, a society where being on a slightly "higher rung" justifies, even entitles, treating others with sadism (just think of Stone, Chinaski's superior, and his orders): a society from which Chinaski, like Bukowski himself, in order to better enjoy his independence and freedom, resigns, or rather, marginalizes himself. The novel is easy to read, although many may find it too vulgar or, beyond any interpretation, some may see the protagonist as a mere alcoholic obsessed with women; certainly alcohol and sex are recurring components (if not constant) in Bukowski's literary work, mainly because sex and alcohol were what the writer lived for, and these components are what make (in my modest and probably to many insignificant opinion) his works more sincere, direct, truthful, beyond any personal stylistic taste or preference, whether one shares or not the cynical and disenchanted vision of man, society, and the world that emerges from this novel.