Customer Reviews

The Road to Los Angeles

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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 ;-).

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.

"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.

This is the first novel of Fante's that I have read and I am interested in reading some more of him. There were times I wanted to throw the whole book in the trash, yet I couldn't stop reading it no matter how terribly repugnant the main character Arturo Bandini was. Arturo is your quintessential megalomaniac and sociopath. At about a third of the way through the novel (page 63 to be exact, when our antihero began torturing flies) I was about to throw in the towel and give up completely. However, something kept me reading. As demented as Arturo was, you can't help but read on to see what in the hell he was going to do and say next. After all, just because you can't stand the main character doesn't necessarily mean that the prose isn't profound. On the contrary, I found Fante to be a very interesting, courageous, and an extremely unique writer. Remember folks, this was written before Bukowski (who thought of him as his 'God') and Toole's classic, Pulitzer prize winning "A Confederacy of Dunces". There is no doubt of the impact he had on both authors and God knows how many countless more. Those of you who love Bukowski and/or Toole's classic should really enjoy this novel by John Fante (his first book, by the way).

I think it is safe to say this novel will never make it in Oprah's book club. Most of the masses will probably not enjoy this at all. On top of being an ego-maniac and a sociopath, Arturo is also sexist, racist, violent, sex-starved, mean-spirited, friendless, indolent, obnoxious, arrogant, profane, completely self-absorbed, etc... ad infinitum. He also enjoys reading Hitler and considers himself a Communist. However, all that being said - he is extremely hilarious to say the least! I especially enjoyed his constant battles with his younger (albeit much more mature), religious, reserved sister Mona and his neurotic, over-bearing, ditsy mother. It's so dysfunctional it will either make you depressed or have you rolling on the floor with laughter (or like me, perhaps a little bit of both). Especially when you take into account this was written before WWII. That is what truly amazed me. It's no wonder Bukowski loved him so much!

Normally a harsh critic of contemporary American literature, I was stunned by this book and by Fante's inimitable talent. Words that come to mind when I think of his work are: raw, genuine, sharp, to-the-bone. The absence of stylizing is a welcome relief, like going from a stuffy, closed room into the cold night air. Fante reminds me of an unself-conscious, unfettered Hemingway. His main character, Arturo, is wonderfully self-absorbed, but the writing is not. And that combination drills into the human character without fear or shame. Fante makes no excuses for his alter-ego; he strips him of any of the dignity of privacy. And we are granted a rare view of our own humanness. I first read Fante in 1985. After "Ask the Dust" I wanted more of his work but couldn't find it on the east coast. I contacted a book broker and had the good fortune to acquire a lettered first of this one...something I would normally never bother to do. But this book is, without a doubt, an American classic...as is Fante himself.

This is, by far, my favorite of the Arturo Bandini ramblings. This book is loaded with interesting characters, wit and self-deprecation. It is as easy to read as White Russians are to drink. Ask The Dust and 1933 Was A Bad Year are very good and pretty good, but The Road To Los Angeles should be included in the short list of "modern" American classics.

After reading Fante's classic book, "Wait Until Spring, Bandini" I decided to continue tasting his prose. By chance I bought "The Road To Los Angeles" only to find out that it was in fact Fante's first book. The book seems to have been considered to racey to be published in 1936 when he first wrote it, but it was discovered in manuscript by his wife after his death in 1983. She had the book published in 1985.

By reading it, I found that Arturo Bandini was first created by Fante as a 20 year old, working in a California cannery. His depiction of the life of Bandini, an aspiring young author, seems, in part to be autobiographical. And, yet, it is clear why Fante chose to go backwards in the life of Bandini, when he wrote his second book, "Wait Until Spring." In Bandini chronology, the second book takes place before the first book and greatly explains from whence Bandini came.

"Road To LA" is a fabulous example of the vicissitudes of the mental processes of an aspiring young author. Bandini sees himself as a great author, yet the book shows the huge pendulous vacillations between an almost meglomaniacal belief in his own greatness to a totally insecure feeling of being just a mediocre hack.

The book does a splendid job of portraying a life representing the beginning of a profession which is often a "Dangerous Profession." Clearly, this precariousness is elucidated by Fante, as he shows just how easy it is to be almost on the edge of madness. It is most illustrative of how an author must be faced with the interpretation of human thought processes, as he works to put meaning into his work. And, not only meaning that is personal, but meaning that will be of value to those who may read his work.

While I would not recommend the book as the first foray for any reader into Fante's work, it is surely one that any reader who is interested in Fante's fascinating portrayals should find the time to read, as it takes one step further, toward the development of his character, and to the development of an author.

Arturo Bandini is a young adolescent who has perhaps read too many books. Now he dreams of becoming a writer himself. That causes conflict with the surrounding world and a lot of comical situations.

Compared to Ask to Dust, Road to Los Angeles is just as good, if not even slightly better. Road to LA has more humor in it and Fante's exquisite imagination really shines through these pages.

The readers who are lambasting this novel obviously have no idea who Fante was or the great influence HL Mencken played in his development as a writer. What makes this book so incredibly funny is how perfectly the adolescent narrator parrots the language, style and philosophy of Mencken and Nietzsche. The readers who have bashed this book obviously never read Mencken or Nietzsche. I suggest they do so before they make bigger jackasses of themselves. This book is easily as funny as and eerily similar to A Confederacy of Dunces, which it predates by some thirty years.

I've heard about John Fante for decades, but never got around to even reading one of his novels until now. My mistake. I erroneously thought his novels were faddish noir mysteries and brummagem (to use an adjective from this novel). All I knew about him was hearsay. But did I luck out when choosing this one, his first and unpublished novel, written around 1933. Why? Well, as a beginner, I'm being introduced to this new writer, from his early start, which I think is an appropriate if accidental and auspicious introduction to the man's writings. And what a head start!

This novel is shamelessly well-written and well-structured. I do not agree with the negative reviewer who said this novel felt like an overly long short story. It isn't a page-turner, pot-boiler with a complex plot, but I liked that it wasn't -- let's call it, intimidating - while, at the same time, reading it "didn't make you puke" -- even if it was a kind of domestic conflict-type story. Has anyone read Gertrude Stein's first novel "Q.E.D."? Glaggh! What a weird and stuffy oddity that first, unpublished novel was! No, John Fante's first novel seems written by someone who's already a professional writer and what's more -- the novel, though 60 years old already -- isn't dated in the least. It feels and reads wholly contemporary, an astonishing feature of this writer's skills. (Okay, people may not light their cigarettes any more with wooden matches and leave them in the street, but if they did, I'd think they're chill, not old fogies.)

This novel is so much about the use of language, both to communicate as well as an expression of art -- again, without being at all intimidating. The main character, Arthur Bandini, relying heavily upon his readings of Nietzsche and Spengler and Marxist doctrine, is nonetheless influenced by Dostoevsky, Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, and Shakespeare -- or certainly the author is.

I felt John Fante depicted well the young and alienated, first-generation Italian son from an immigrant Italian family with its conformist conventions and bromidic assumptions and his struggles to be independent, self-valuing, and creative. This novel was a joy to read. It also reminded me how terrible and traumatic are the late teen years.