Post Office [contains mention of sexual assault] – The spectator

American poet and author Charles Bukowski said in a 1981 interview: “I get a lot of letters in the mail about my writing, and they say, ‘Bukowski, you’re so shitty and you’re still surviving.’ I have decided not to kill myself.’ . . . In a way, I save people. . . Not that I want to save her: I have no desire to save anyone. . . So these are my readers, you see? They buy my books – the defeated, the mad and the damned – and I’m proud of them.”

Bukowski has published books of poetry titled Love Is A Dog From Hell and Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window.

Post Office, the first novel in a trilogy that blurs autobiography and fiction, is entertaining and raw in its uncompromising nastiness and hateful, straightforward pessimism. It is truly a story of the defeated, the mad and the damned. The book follows Hank Chinaski, an unhappy and hateful alcoholic, through his unfortunately long career in the US Postal Service. “It started as a mistake,” says the first line of the book, which really sets the tone for Chinaski’s postal life.

Bukowski takes us through a variety of everyday crises faced by Chinaski, who alternates between extremely drunk and extremely hungover, spending his money on horse betting and more alcohol, and struggling through soul-destroying workdays. He finds himself faced with the incredible pace of work expected from a boss with whom he wages a cold war in the office and who punishes him with brutal assignments of mail delivery routes and every little bureaucratic torture he can think of. This boss, Jonstone, who has worked at the post office for 30 years, is called “The Stone” by Chinaski. Chinaski is smart enough to play the system in his favor, while The Stone plays it against him as a cruel authoritarian. Their petty power struggles are hilarious and tragically relatable to anyone who has been at the mercy of a similar authority figure.

We also see the extreme dysfunction and eventual failure of more than a few of Chinaski’s marriages, as well as several affairs. Chinaski is bitter and self-serving to the core. He does whatever he wants without regard to his marriage, the well-being of others, or anything that gets in his way. He seems almost completely amoral, devoid of love, guilt or real compassion. He’s not a Bateman-esque psychopath, but rather comes across as a man so beaten down that he’s simply given up caring. Nevertheless, he is a compelling narrator because of his intelligence, his always comical and brutal assessment of everything around him, and his struggles within and against a system that you come to hate more than him. It’s fun to be guided through the terrible fight of his life.

At times I have rooted for him as he navigates life’s twists and turns and daily struggles, even when he doesn’t really deserve success.

As a reader and writer, I generally like complex and flowery prose with way too many “time to look it up in the dictionary” words and incredibly long sentences (think Nabokov, Pynchon, or McCarthy). Bukowski is a complete opposite, incredibly succinct and blunt, but he pulls it off perfectly. The work’s appeal lies primarily in its provocative vulgarity, its uncomfortable, unwavering honesty, and the factual yet carefully constructed prose serves this well. Bukowski will just say it, whatever Chinaski’s heinous thought or deed, he will lay it right in front of you.

Many readers will probably reach a point in this book, be it Chinaski’s lowest moment, the rape of a stranger in the mail, or somewhere before that, where they just don’t want to hear about this horrible, violent, misogynistic piece of shit guy anymore. The whole thing is made even more unpleasant by Chinaski’s transparent portrayal of Bukowski, who spoke very openly about his alcoholism, his womanizing and his extremely problematic private life. Obviously, it’s not fair to assume that Bukowski did everything terrible that Chinaski did. Chinaski feels like a character created by Bukowski to manifest and exaggerate all of his darkest traits in a completely unredeemable man. On the back of the copy I have, Chinaski is described as Bukowski’s “literary alter ego.””

I think that the kind of modesty, or perhaps just lack of attention to image, that is required to present oneself as an author in such an unflattering way is commendable and has led to many great works of art like this book. I can’t blame people who simply can’t get along with a protagonist like Chinaski or who find the book’s content reprehensible, but for me Bukowski stands out here as an author, poet and artist. It’s in his willingness to record the experiences of people like Chinaski, because whether we want to think about it or not, they are out there, people living terrible lives and doing terrible things and struggling to survive in their miserable world of their own creation .