My Favourite Books

Number 10 - Post Office - Charles Bukowski The three regular readers of this blog (you know who you are) will be familiar with my liking for the work of Charles Bukowski. I was a relative late-comer to his writing, having only discovered his books by accident about 10 years ago - though I remembered having seen the film based on his life long before that. 'Post Office' is probably not the best of his novels but it was the first one I read and my affection for it remains undiminished. 'Post Office' features an alcoholic postman by the name of Henry Chinaski. Immediately before publishing this, his first novel, Charles Bukowski was a postman with the US Mail. He was also an alcoholic. I wonder if, by any chance, Chinaski and Bukowski are related. Almost all of Bukowski's work is autobiographical, and it is a total mystery how he could have been such a prolific writer while living an utterly chaotic life, a life almost entirely enslaved by alcohol. But, the fact is that the scenes he describes in this book and elsewhere ACTUALLY HAPPENED. As so often, I was captivated by the opening page, "It began as a mistake. It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damned near anybody, and so I went and the next thing I knew I had this leather sack on my back and was hiking around at my leisure. What a job, I thought. Soft! They only gave you a block or 2 and if you managed to finish, the regular carrier would give you another block to carry, or maybe you'd go back in and the soup would give you another, but you just took your time and shoved those Xmas cards in the slots. I think it was my second day as a Christmas temp that this big woman came out and walked around with me as I delivered letters. What I mean by big was that her ass was big and her tits were big and that she was big in all the right places. She seemed a bit crazy but I kept looking at her body and I didn't care. She talked and talked and talked. Then it came out. Her husband was an officer on an island far away and she got lonely, you know, and lived in this little house in back all by herself." From there, off we go on a depraved life of drinking beer, one-night stands with the big woman and others of a similar sort, losing money at race-tracks, throwing up, and drinking beer. And delivering the odd letter from time to time. I must say (and I'm sure that my friend Martin will agree when he reads this), that this life-style bears a striking similarity to our summer and Christmas seasons in the Campbeltown Post Office in the mid-70s. So there's a certain nostalgic appeal for me in this book as well. As indicated before, Bukowski is not for the easily offended. Otherwise get it and read it. It is both hilariously funny and desperately sad simultaneously.