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A review by joannaautumn
Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944-1990 by Charles Bukowski
4.0
This is as clean as it gets – this is the collection of short stories, essays and other short writings from Bukowski: it’s very simple and very effective.
I have been reading his work since I was a teen, so I was about 15-16 or around that age. I knew nothing really.
But I had a will to learn and I learned from the books I read, at the period his books had helped me be more free than I was – in a sense to always keep my thoughts simple and how little it takes to make me full. I didn’t like injustice, lies and hypocrisy – I still don’t but as time goes I have come to realize you can’t escape that.
I have been fascinated with how much people try to conceal who they really are, be it bad or good. Then again, I still believe in the idea that you can do whatever you want as long as you don’t harm anyone by doing that – that’s how I go through in life, or at least try to live by that.
Bukowski is a voice for the voiceless, a voice for the people who society didn’t bother writing about.
He shows us the darker side of life, in both his prose and in his poetry – he wasn’t much of a fighter, all he did was write about the things he lived and the things that he loved and the things that repulsed him – in a way he wrote himself into his work. As he said about style – it’s not a shield, Style means ultimate naturalness. Style means one man alone with billions of men.
With this collection, I understood his intentions better and respect him more for fighting for a voice in the world, in the only way he knew how – by writing and disassociating.
His stories are far from perfect, his characters are not the type of men (I say men because he didn’t know how to write about a woman, except in his early poetry – in the poems for Jane, but that is not enough for me) I would like people to look up to, but they are not meant to be anybody’s role model, they are just meant to exist and be there as all of us.
Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way, or even to say a simple thing in a simpler way – This part can’t be more true, and for this and many other statements that I deeply agree with, I still stick to this man and his writing even though I don’t agree with the portrayal of women and of different races (meaning anybody who isn’t white) in his work. Take caution with approaching his work.
I read John Fante, and I know he admired him very much – even wrote a short story in his honor and that one sentence where he said that although they are similar, Fante is a good guy while he is a bastard(rough translation, I don’t have an English version of that saying). That made me think for a while, Fante was forgotten while Bukowski remains the Icon for his work.
All in all, I am really glad I bought this book and read it. I shall see if I will raise it up to 5 stars, a solid 4,5 for now.
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4,5 maybe 5, one of his better collections, review to come.
I have been reading his work since I was a teen, so I was about 15-16 or around that age. I knew nothing really.
But I had a will to learn and I learned from the books I read, at the period his books had helped me be more free than I was – in a sense to always keep my thoughts simple and how little it takes to make me full. I didn’t like injustice, lies and hypocrisy – I still don’t but as time goes I have come to realize you can’t escape that.
I have been fascinated with how much people try to conceal who they really are, be it bad or good. Then again, I still believe in the idea that you can do whatever you want as long as you don’t harm anyone by doing that – that’s how I go through in life, or at least try to live by that.
Bukowski is a voice for the voiceless, a voice for the people who society didn’t bother writing about.
He shows us the darker side of life, in both his prose and in his poetry – he wasn’t much of a fighter, all he did was write about the things he lived and the things that he loved and the things that repulsed him – in a way he wrote himself into his work. As he said about style – it’s not a shield, Style means ultimate naturalness. Style means one man alone with billions of men.
With this collection, I understood his intentions better and respect him more for fighting for a voice in the world, in the only way he knew how – by writing and disassociating.
His stories are far from perfect, his characters are not the type of men (I say men because he didn’t know how to write about a woman, except in his early poetry – in the poems for Jane, but that is not enough for me) I would like people to look up to, but they are not meant to be anybody’s role model, they are just meant to exist and be there as all of us.
Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way, or even to say a simple thing in a simpler way – This part can’t be more true, and for this and many other statements that I deeply agree with, I still stick to this man and his writing even though I don’t agree with the portrayal of women and of different races (meaning anybody who isn’t white) in his work. Take caution with approaching his work.
I read John Fante, and I know he admired him very much – even wrote a short story in his honor and that one sentence where he said that although they are similar, Fante is a good guy while he is a bastard(rough translation, I don’t have an English version of that saying). That made me think for a while, Fante was forgotten while Bukowski remains the Icon for his work.
All in all, I am really glad I bought this book and read it. I shall see if I will raise it up to 5 stars, a solid 4,5 for now.
-------------------------------------------------
4,5 maybe 5, one of his better collections, review to come.