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Charles Bukowski

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LA Low-life

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SOURCE: “LA Low-life,” in Times Literary Supplement, November 29, 1974, p. 1336.

[In the following review of Life and Death in the Charity Ward, Feaver praises the humor and intensity of the stories in the collection.]

In the sonsobitches school of writing you talk as you speak, but more so. Short sentences. Expletives. “Oh shit, oh shit”, your characters say nearly every time they achieve climax. Life is a balling, boozing, brawling merry-go-round and the tears show through the vomiting. Charles Bukowski treads the streets and pads of Los Angeles where many others trod before him: Philip Marlowe, for one, and the Kerouac crowd when they weren't in San Francisco or on the road. He writes evidently from experience, tightened up. His way of life veers between the campus poetry-reading and the charity ward where things reach bottom. It consists of shocking the folks one side of the tracks, letting rip the other side, and looking back to see how it all goes down in the world of books.

There's any amount of fresh, raging agony and ecstasizing in this set of short stories [Life and Death in the Charity Ward]. They are mostly very short and one-shot. As a rule, the author acts as guide, though other personae are sometimes created and given precedence—and in any case it's impossible to tell when Mr Bukowski is writing about himself or someone more so. He does three-line sentences every now and again, takes the reader by the nose and pulls him through apartments, warehouses and bars, talking all the while in a Marlowe-on-the-skids monotone.

Two things save the collection from being simply idiomatic-romantic. First, it's persistently funny, in a Guys and Dolls turned bums and asses way. The other quality is its intermingling of Howl and Spillane. As the monologue gathers pace and is brought to bear fully, ferociously on its targets, it sets up a tirade admirable in its intensity, strong enough to blow others, such as Hunter Thompson, who have tried venting all in this spirit, right off the Los Angeles map.

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