"Post Office" by Charles Bukowski

I've read some of Bukowski's poetry long time ago, when I was not much into reading poetry (you need to get old for that), so I soon forgot about it until recently (somehow) I remember him again and decided to read a novel from him - his first novel.

He wrote it in less than a month, and it is pretty short.  It probably would not have published today where publisher expect 700-page novels because they sell better to half-brained customers who do not know better.  It is pretty good though.

Pretty much everything in the novel is scaled down to the absolute minimum.  It reminds me of Chuck Palahniuk's writings, but without the agenda. The novel describes the 10 or so years that he spent working for the US Post Office and all the ins and out of job plus all the ladies he shacked with during that time.  The US Post office is described like something from a Kafka or Orwell novel, employing imbeciles with imbecilic rules and dark career prospects.  He describes how he was assigned the worst routes, because he always gave lip to his supervisors and never gave a damn about their imaginary authority. 

His descriptions of the women he lived with are very rudimentary, as he wasn't fully aware who they were.  That's probably true since he was drunk most of the time when he wasn't working and most of the working time he was hungover, so very little mental capacity remained to get to know someone deeper (except himself), besides the default biological, physiological and companionship needs.

I enjoyed his curt and to-the-point style, though, nowadays so much extreme garbage has been written, his expressions don't seem all that edgy anymore.