I wanted the whole world or nothing

Today’s book recommendation, worded by a woman with a better grasp of her vocabulary than I could ever wish for.

From the opening line: “It began as a mistake,” Bukowski, as alter-ego Henry Chinaski, writes straight from the hip in unambiguous, accessible prose. A congenital loser trapped in a dead-end profession from which he can derive no personal satisfaction, yet possessed of enough self-awareness to recognize the absurdity of his situation, Chinaski is an Everyman of the underclass.

By turns insincerely servile and unrepentantly sarcastic, he constantly chafes under the seemingly unnecessary regulations imposed on him at the post office and delights in the all-too-rare occasions where he is able to get the better of a superior by delivering the last word.

His slyly humorous on-the-job exploits with desperate housewives, fierce dogs, sore muscles, and endless sheets of rain are interspersed with moments of the very real frustrations of an adjunct at the mercy of circumstances against which he seldom has recourse…” 

– Nicole Gluckstern for The Quarterly Conversation.

Charles Bukowski’s first novel Post Office is dirty realism at it’s best.

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