Factotum - Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski is one of those authors whose work I’ve been aware of for a long time without actually reading any of it until now. I came across a copy of FACTOTUM, an early, autobiographical novel by Bukowski and read it yesterday. Set during and just after World War II, it features Henry Chinaski, a thinly-disguised version of Bukowski himself. Chinaski wanders around the country, gets drunk, works at a variety of menial jobs that he hates, tries to be a writer, and sleeps with a bunch of slutty women. And if you want any more plot than that, you’re out of luck with FACTOTUM. It starts and stops rather arbitrarily and ultimately seems pretty pointless . . . which was probably Bukowski’s point.

I tend to enjoy low-life novels. Quite a few Gold Medals and other paperbacks from the Fifties fall into that category. Bukowski does a fine job here of capturing the squalid parts of various cities. There are some good descriptive bits and nice lines of dialogue, and the terse, Hemingway-like prose reads very fast, always a plus where I’m concerned. After a while, though, the plotlessness and the squalor got really old to me, which makes me think that while I didn’t actually dislike the book, I might prefer Bukowski in smaller doses, such as short stories. However, there are two more novels featuring Henry Chinaski, POST OFFICE and WOMEN, and I might read them one of these days, just to complete the trilogy.