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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Eloquent Sewage of a Drunken Mind-The Buk Pukes It Up,
By A Customer
This review is from: Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (Paperback)
Bukowski's carnival of the grotesque culminates in a collection of shorts that take you through booze, broads, cockroach-infested rooming houses and inevitably, skid row. Buk banalizes wretched despair making it seem comic, terrible and commonpace as a car wreck. Not for the uninitiated, these pages show Buk at his hardcore, least palatable best. (Beginners should try Ham on Rye for laughs and biographical insight.) For a quick sampler, juxtapose "The Most Beautiful Woman in Town" with "3 Chickens and "The Copulating Mermaid of Venice Beach, Ca." Who else could put the poetry in necrophilia and the pathos in suicide? Make you split a gut as two old whores do the dozens over his sexually spent body while the heat is ever at the door? Make you feel a tingle when two fat-headed slobs kiss the lovely lips of a stolen corpse and float her out to a sunlit sea? Make you cry when a gorgeous, self-lacerating nutjob drags a broken bottle across her neck and disappears forever into the LA night, never to warm the corner barstool again... If you ever manage to get your hands on this book, bring a flask, bottle of Peopto Bismol and a handkerchief. Strap yourself in and get ready for a bumpy night.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What a good writer!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (Paperback)
The tales in this book are from the Bukowski's greatests creations. They seem to be easily written, but with a quality (and rythm) that only a master could put on it. Definitely, one of the bests writers in English language in the XX century.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ruminations of a 'Barfly'...,
By
This review is from: Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (Paperback)
If you dont know who Charles Bukowski is, he is the guy who the movie Barfly (Mickey Rourke) was written by , and seems to be an autobiography of (though never stated as such). Dont be misled by the title, it's more MAD and PERVERSE than you think! With eloquence and gritty realism (yes, cliche, I know) "Buk" brings the LA underbelly right to your face with no reservations whatsoever. Fiction? Non-Fiction? Autobiographical? You get the feeling he has lived some if not all his stories and his style of writing ABSORBS you into the pages and immerses you deeply into SKID ROW in a bizarrely ROMANTIC manner. At times it made me feel like tying a handkerchief to the end of a stick, slingin it over my shoulder, and hoppin' a freight train with little more than some cigarettes, a stained wifebeater shirt, and a whiskey 'haze' along with me for the ride. Need some excitement? Crack this book open and LOL your AO and then quickly cringe in disgust. I've read very few short stories such as these; the kind of short stories that grab you, drag you down the street into the cheapest and dirtiest bar in town where you quickly get into a fistfight, completely DRUNK off your ass, and then swindled out of your last dime by what is probably the oldest hooker alive.
I read this book in college after a friend dropped it by my room, cover torn off, pages stained from coffee and ripped from much use with a note on it saying 'figured this was up your alley'?! Funny thing, the condition of the book seemed to match the condition of the lives of most of the characters inside it! While the title mentions things associated with sex, it's not THE focus of the short stories that lay within but its definitely NOT a neglected topic. Sexual tales share time with binge-drinking, horse races, benders, fist fights, freight trains, and an occasional job here and there to pay for booze. These tales (of ordinary madness?) involving folks from the 'other side of the tracks', who dwell in the dark recesses of flop-houses, street corners, and hobo hotels are all spun by Bukowski with a familiarity that only someone living the same lifestyle could relate to us 'squares' with such detail. Tales of people all trying to eek out some sort of 'life' in search of the next drink, next lay, and next place to collapse their weary bodies stretched thin from hard living. Plenty of fighting, boozing, sex, more fighting, more booze, the cops, horse races, LA street-life, dirty hotels, dirtier women and the men who lay with them on dirty mattresses in exchange for warm beer and cheap whiskey. Excellent stuff, might want to take a shower afterwards to wash off some of this INCREDIBLE DIRT!
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