The Road to Los Angeles [Hardcover]

John Fante (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2002

I had a lot of jobs in Los Angeles Harbor because our family was poor and my father was dead. My first job was ditchdigging a short time after I graduated from high school. Every night I couldn’t sleep from the pain in my back. We were digging an excavation in an empty lot, there wasn’t any shade, the sun came straight from a cloudless sky, and I was down in that hole digging with two huskies who dug with a love for it, always laughing and telling jokes, laughing and smoking bitter tobacco.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

John Fante began writing in 1929 and published his first short story in 1932. His first novel, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, was published in 1938 and was the first of his Arturo Bandini series of novels, which also include The Road to Los Angeles and Ask the Dust. A prolific screenwriter, he was stricken with diabetes in 1955. Complications from the disease brought about his blindness in 1978 and, within two years, the amputation of both legs. He continued to write by dictation to his wife, Joyce, and published Dreams from Bunker Hill, the final installment of the Arturo Bandini series, in 1982. He died on May 8, 1983, at the age of seventy-four.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 164 pages
• Publisher: Black Sparrow Books (June 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0876856504
• ISBN-13: 978-0876856505
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,707,934 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining, Bukowski-esque Homage to 30's LA, July 8, 2003

By 

D. Ross "http://directorblue.blogspot.com" (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Road to Los Angeles (Paperback)

John Fante's youthful Arturo Bandini is an intriguing, bizarre and absolutely unique character. Growing up poor, in East L.A., Bandini endures a succession of menial jobs to help support his mother and sister. His odd, self-taught upbringing gives him a huge vocabulary and the willingness to employ it at a moment's notice. Bandini is insecure, shy, well-spoken and monumentally unfit for adulthood.

_The Road to Los Angeles_ describes Bandini's rites of passage and inevitable coming of age. Covering his relationships with "hidden women", his attempt at a first novel and a spate of unabashed cruelty towards various creatures, the protaganist is humorous but apparently teetering on the brink of insanity.

Bandini's BB-gun-fueled "war with the crabs" is a wonderfully comic extravaganza of unwarranted viciousness... "I shot crabs all that afternoon, until my shoulder hurt behind the gun and my eyes ached behind the gunsight. I was Dictator Bandini, Ironman of Crabland. This was another Blood Purge for the Fatherland. The had tried to unseat me, those damned crabs... had actually questioned the might of Superman Bandini! Well, they were going to get a lesson they would never forget. This was going to be the last revolution they'd never attempt, by Christ."

Fante is eminently readable and this book was particularly enjoyable. And, yes, I am a fan of Charles Bukowski as well ;-).

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unusual point-of-view, May 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Road to Los Angeles (Paperback)

This book kept me reading!Fante kept me in the peculiar mindset of the main character, Arturo, where Arturo consciously decides to present himself to the world as a jerk; but at the same time Arturo is reflective enough for me to feel sorry for him at times.Fante writes in that gap between who we REALLY are, and how we decide what we're comfortable with showing everyone else.The Road to Los Angeles is accessible, and doesn't hammer the reader with convoluted views about how the world ought to be.Currently, I am reading Ask the Dust. Many people who've critiqued both books by Fante seem to like Ask the Dust much more. I was totally engaged by The Road to LA. Ask the Dust is a decent enough book; but The Road to LA is without question my favorite of the 2.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outrageous Comedy, April 12, 2001

By 

Paul Miller "___[_]D___" (Memphis) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Road to Los Angeles (Paperback)

"The Road to Los Angeles" is Fante's first novel. He began it in 1933 and finished in 1936. The publishers rejected it and it was published about 50 years later by Black Sparrow press after the authors death. This is Fante's best novel and one of the funniest most enjoyable books I have read to date. Reading this is a wonder and a revelation, the prose raw and fresh, honest and hilarious. The story follows Arturo Bandini, a prideful fool of an eighteen year old as he makes his way in 1930s California. He lives with his mother and sister, works in a cannery, and aspires to be a great writer. Arturo has read too many books and has got hold of some bad philosophy. Fante uses this to poke fun at Nietsche's and Hitler's "superman" weltanschauung (worldview), which the befuddled Arturo pontificates every chance he gets. At the point when Nietzsche loses his mind he is said to have been watching a man whip an old horse, Nietzsche burst into tears and hugs the horse weeping uncontrollably. Fante uses this when in the book Arturo sees an old hunchback woman smiling in the park, his eyes drenced he carries her basket for her. After feeling pure empathy for her life and pain he says goodbye to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and runs home and apologizes to his mother. This doesn't last of course and he goes back to being the same old Arturo. Early in the novel he enacts a hilarious though disturbing blood purge ,"for the good of the Fatherland", against some crabs he imagined had questioned the might of Superman Bandini. Later in the book at times when he is down on himself he refers to himself as a crabkiller. There is much, much more. Please read this marvel of a novel by John Fante.