Customer Reviews

Life and Death in the Charity Ward (London Magazine editions)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Charles Bukowski, Life and Death in the Charity Ward (London Magazine Editions, 1974)

Reading an early book (released early in his career) by an icon is often an amusing experience; it's the opposite of "soon to be a major motion picture!' never coming to fruition. The copywriter for LM writes that Bukowski is "justifiably becoming best-known for his stories." News to those of us reading this thirty years later.

The stories collected here are some of Buk's rawest material, and that's saying something. They go beyond the crude and into the obscene; it's pretty easy to see why no one has picked this one up for reprinting, though one would think a more extreme press (Creation comes to mind) would jump at the chance to get this stuff back out on the streets. The stories, which one wavers between believing autobiographical and hoping to god they're not, detail the lives of various alcoholic losers. Some of them also have amusing side traits like being rapists or child molesters. They're written in the typical Buk slice-of-life style, but the reader is left hoping that these are slices of no one's life.

What makes them worth reading is that they are written in the typical Buk slice-of-life style. Being short stories, they never have the chance to lose their pace, the way the novels sometimes do, and while they all sound the same after a while, there are enough differences in the characters (when they're not focusing on Buk himself-- who may not be the writer in some cases, but a character with the same name-- or Buk's longtime character Hank Chinaski) to keep them separate, at least while you're reading.

Deeply disquieting. Not nearly the book Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame or War All the Time is, but a good one for those who prefer the fiction to the poetry, or want to see just how brutal fiction could be in 1974. (They are also advised to seek out Joyce Carol Oates' best novel, Cybele, published the same year and never reprinted for exactly the same reason.) ***