FACTOTUM – BUKOWSKI

Hello, I’m going to talk about Factotum, a book written by Charles Bukowski in 1975.
As the title suggests, it is a story about a man who does everything, or almost everything. We follow the wandering of Henry Chinaski, a fallen writer during WW2 in America.
Chinaski is like Bukowski’s alter ego, written in the first person narrative, we discover a wandering life from New Orleans to New York, by way of Los Angeles or Philadelphia. So Chinaski jumps from one job to another without being concerned about it, spending his time drinking and writing about his disappointments, his frustrations, women… For him, what matters the most is to have a place where you can live your life : it doesn’t matter whether it is on the street or in a slum. This wise guy doesn’t care about money, social conventions and so on, thinking that it is reserved for special people.

What I love about this book and this author, it is the way of wrinting of Bukowski : combining obscenity and provocation, in brief, what he is famous for. He writes without any judgments, with honest and straight-forward manner. Moreover, he depicts America of the 40’s and its lost and marginal generation.

Laisser un commentaire