Customer Reviews

Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Here's a story kiddies, please bear with me:

Years ago I was a struggling, naive graduate student in English at a major southern university. Like a fool, I decided to write a master's thesis on Charles Bukowski. The department chair stuck me with a professor who was supposedly the resident expert on contemporary American literature. From our first conversation it was clear that the man not only had no respect for Buk, but hated his work and hated the very notion that anyone would want to do graduate level work on him. He dismissed the idea with a sniff, saying, "He's marginal and unworthy. No one has written a book on him." I am sad to report that I let the bastard get the better of me. The thesis went unwritten.

Well, that was a decade ago and since then there have been several very fine books written about Bukowski. Three excellent volumes come readily to mind: Neeli Cherkovski's seminal biography, "Bukowski: A Life"; Gay Brewer's Twayne volume, "Charles Bukowski"; and Russell Harrison's "Against the American Grain." All are top notch in their own way.

Now we have Howard Sounes' worthy addition to this list, "Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life." This new biography works well as a compliment to Cherkovski's more intimate work (Neeli and Hank were good friends and the closeness of their relationship informs every page of the text). Sounes' book is more flamboyant, to be sure, and paints Bukowski in darker colors than does Cherkovski's. Both portraits are quite valuable and, even more important, both are very good reads.

I'm still waiting, though, for the definitive Bukowski biography to emerge, a book that combines a true scholar's rigor with a novelist's eye for detail. Maybe some new English professor or graduate student coming up will grab for the brass ring. I can't help but think that our universities will finally forget their snobbery and small brained prejudices and hop on the Bukowski bandwagon.

What I would love to see published is a book that encompasses the pictures painted by Sounes, Cherkovski, Brewer and Harrison, with added chunks of personal grace and style thrown in by this to-be-named biographer. It's bound to happen some day because Bukowski's legacy is simply too daunting, too great to be ignored.

In the meantime, I recommend this book and all of the others I named above. There are other fine volumes on Buk out there, too. Go find them all and read them right away. You'll learn lots of cool stuff and be the life of your next cocktail party!

Thi extensively researched book reads like a novel of Bukowski's life . I was swept up in the gripping narrative. I knew Bukowski and we were close friends for 20 years, so it was like reading an account of my own life. There were fotos I'd never seen before, of Hank and his family, of his girlfriends in later years, and a lot of information about Bukowski that Sounes discovered during his research. I was very impressed with the book and recommend it to anyone intersted in Bukowski's extraordinary life. Sounes did not spare him, but he was fair and objective. I came away with the feeling that I had gone back in time and relived those days of poetry and booze and women, the race track, the hard years at the post office. It's all there, brilliantly recreated by Howard Sounes.

Howard Sounes' new Bukowski biography is much better than Cherkovski's BUKOWSKI: A LIFE, or Steve Richmond's self-serving SPINNING OFF BUKOWSKI; but it's still not great. He does dispel some of the Bukowski mythology (which Bukowski himself was the main promoter of) that has grown over the years. Unfortunately, he dwells too much on Bukowski's sex life, which can be read about in two fat Bukowski books (in every Bukowski book really) WOMEN and LOVE IS A DOG FROM HELL. This would be a good introduction for the uninitiated, but for Buk fanatics it's nothing new. Try Gay Brewer's wonderful CHARLES BUKOWSKI, for a more in depth (though somewhat academic) look at what Bukowski is important for: HIS WRITING! And for Bukowski's publishing history the forthcoming DESCRIPTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE PRIMARY WORKS OF CHARLES BUKOWSKI by Aaron Krumhansl, will be indispensible.

Howard Sounes Buk bio is not nearly as detailed or as informative as his Bob Dylan bio, but it is far and away the best work on Bukowski I have thus far encountered. The reason for the lack of access is simple enough. A writer, by sheer necessity, is a solitary figure. He must spend the majority of his time alone. Most writers are also paid liars. Also, given that most of Bukowski's early loves & friends are dead, as is Bukowski himself, it would be difficult to come by much in the way of useful firsthand information. That being said, I feel that Sounes did the best he could with what was available. The Dylan bio would have more info just because a musician generally has to work closely with many other people. Bukowski had only to work closely with his publisher, John Martin.

I've suspected for years that Bukowski was about half the man he claimed to be. Sounes has confirmed my suspicions. He was a jealous, sometimes violent lover. He was guilty of more than his fair share of back-biting & backstabbing. He wasn't even the constant drunk he portrayed himself to be(trust me on that one...there's no strike against him for that). What he was was an occasionally great and always prolific writer of verse and prose. Sounes exposes many an untruth in Bukowski's account of his own life. He also makes available one of the best and most comprehensive collections of photographs ever presented of Bukowski, including photos of his chief muse, Jane.

I advise reading this book if you want the truth about Bukowski, not the myth. This won't help feed any hero-worship. It is well-researched and beautifully written in an easy, flowing narrative, not unlike Bukowski's sparse style of storytelling. I had long believed that Buk was not so much hateful towards people and life as he was afraid of them. Sounes appears to confirm this. Avid Bukowski fans will already know much of the material presented within these pages, as few have detailed their own lives in such sheer volume as Bukowski, but Sounes does an agreeable job of separating fact from fiction in Bukowski's autobiographical pieces. You will not often be pleased with the liberties Bukowski takes with the details of his friends' lives.

Sounes one failing is that he gives way to the temptation to insert his own opinions of Bukowski's work and behavior towards the end of the book. He does a better job of sidestepping this common pitfall in his Dylan bio. He does seem to've learned his lesson after the Buk bio. Locked In The Arms Of A Crazy Life is a must for any Bukowski fan who prefers honesty to mythology. One of America's great writers was far from being one of America's great men and Sounes has certainly captured that fact and built his biography around that.

If you are new to Bukowski, check out The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills, Post Office, Love Is A Dog From Hell & You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense. The Most Beautiful Woman In Town & Other Stories is worth buying for the title piece alone. It was, in my opinion, the best short story he ever wrote.

This is by far the best book about Buk I've ever read. It gives you better and more detailed information than i.e. Cherkovski or Richmond. But the real treasure of the book are its pictures. INCREDIBLE !! And most of them unpublished until now. A must buy.

I first discovered the work of Charles Bukowski approximately five years ago, and I was immediately impressed. The more I read the more I enjoyed. I had heard all the legendary tales, the horror stories and the millions of tales of drunken mania, but I purposely stayed away from reading anything ABOUT the man. I didn't want to be disappointed when the reality is often times a far cry from the truth.
Eventually I broke down and bought this book, simply because the countless stories of his life were really becoming too much, and I wanted to know a little more about the man. If at all possible, from an independent observer who was not a Bukowski crony. I think this book accomplishes the task of being a reasonably detached look at the life of a complicated individual, with a few complaints.
First, the author obviously fell in love with Bukowski during this book (or perhaps before he even wrote it), and it shows constantly. There are admitted mistakes in his life, but the real warts are brushed over rather quickly.
Second, the book felt rushed. I think the book would have been much better if the author took his time and wrote a comprehensive 500-700 page book, which he obviously could have done. There are more than enough things to write about. Whole accounts of his womanizing and his time with the LA Free Press are just glanced over. I think it cheated the reader
Lastly, the author quickly passes over the interpersonal relationships Bukowski formed and spoke almost exclusively of events. Events don't tell us the whole story, and what he did write about the relationships was shallow at best. Linda King was the only one who had any depth added. The lack of interpersonal discussions really failed to bring out the third dimension in this book, and it fell a little flat.
The good thing for the author is that he writes well, and thankfully, Charles Bukowski is an interesting subject. I find it hard to believe anyone could really make his life boring. So the book is worth reading, especially if you are like me and don't know much about the man, but if you do I think the reader might find this a bit overly simplistic.

If I could have I would have rated this a 3.5 star book. Because I like Bukowski's work, I will round up. I am huge fan of biographies and this just isn't one of the better ones.

So wrote Bukowski to the editor of Black Sun Press in response to her request for a short autobiographical sketch (p. 25). Although written in 1946, when Bukowsky was in his mid-20s, and at least partly intended to be tongue-in-cheek, it seems an appropriate lifelong epithet.

Bukowski the author and Bukowski the man seem never to have quite figured out who they were. Warped by an abusive father, a passive mother, and a disfiguring case of acne vulgaris that only deepened his adolescent alienation, unable to relate to women, a drunkard who seemed hellbent on self-destruction, and a sometimes violent man who insisted on keeping almost everyone at an emotional distance, Bukowski clearly had deep psychological conflicts that cry out for examination. But while he wrote obsessively about the facts of his life, he was remarkably obtuse in reflecting on their significance. Except for Ham on Rye, his prose works display little self-scrutiny. His poetry is a bit more reflective, but not by much.

Enter Howard Sounes' biography, Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life. Anyone picking it up in the hopes of discovering who Bukowski is will be disappointed. For the most part, Sounes follows the storyline chronicled in Bukowski's autobiographical fiction, contenting himself with correcting minor falsehoods and omissions, and substituting real names for the contrived ones Bukowski used in his novels. But as with Bukowski's own work, the reader is confronted with little except the bare-boned facts. There's almost no effort on Sounes' part to get beneath the external data to discern the psychological character of his subject. At the end of the day, we know no more about Bukowski than he himself claimed to know in his note to Mrs. Crosby.

The unfortunate consequence is that readers are likely to close Sounes' biography with a distinctly bad taste in their mouths for Bukowsky. Sounes doesn't sugar-coat his presentation of Bukowsky's demons: his mean-spiritedness and vindictiveness (p. 88), his betrayal of benefactors and emotional rape of their women (pp. 136-39), his pedophiliac fantasies (p. 148), and his cruelty (pp. 175, 192-195). This sort of behavior cries out for some analysis on the part of a biographer. But Sounes' is satisfied with the lame pseudo-explanation that Bukowsky's lifestyle personifies a "philosophy of non-participation" (p. 221), whatever that means.

Ultimately, then, Sounes' Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life doesn't answer the question of who Charles Bukowski is. If anything, it only underscores the puzzle.

Funny it took a British biographer to get the Charles Bukowski story right. Sounes put a great deal of time and effort into tracking the myth and reality of this best selling poet and public madman. This is the most balanced account of Bukowski's life which means he comes out looking like a very talented but wretched human being who eventually turned on most of his friends by creating unfavorable representations in his work. There are all kinds of intriguing music-related tidbits: his jealousy of Pete Townshend, his immediate recognition of U2 as a sellout band, despite dedicating a concert to he and his wife, his turndown of a photo shoot with Madonna even though Sean Penn was a regular drinking buddy. Written in a fast-paced fictionalized narrative, this one is a sure winner.

This bio is a must for Bukowski fans and anyone else for that matter! Beautifully written, incredibly well researched. A fascinating read from beginning to end. 5 star recommendation for sure!!!

a year ago i was out on my duff out of my house and out of my mind. bukowski's life and his survival and moxie kept me alive just reading it...just this book. then i went to the library picked up some of his poems and hung on...his poems do that. thanks buk