About this book

I recently read Post Office by Charles Bukowski, which was published in 1971. This is a relatively short book at 196 pages. I bought the paperback version from Thriftbooks, which has become my source for books during the past 4 months. The book is nicely bound and has a large font making it extremely easy to read for those of us that don’t have the best eyesight in the world. The quality of the pages are good and the book is 8″ high x 5 1/4″ wide, making it the ideal size to hold comfortably. I don’t recall what I paid for it, but it was less than $20 USD.

Summary

Post Office is a story about Henry Chinaski and his career with the United States Post Office. If you are unfamiliar with Charles Bukowski he worked in the post office for around 10 years, eventually quitting and becoming a fulltime writer. The book starts with a dedication “This is presented as a work of fiction and dedicated to nobody”, then the code of ethics for the post office is printed on what is really the first page of the book. The plot is about how Henry Chinaski started as a postal carrier and then as a clerk. The book is primarily about this miserable job, his interactions with supervisors and other workers, the women he had sex with, and of course drinking. I have read quite a bit about Charles Bukowski prior to reading Post Office and the details he writes about in this book could only have come from his own experiences, possibly embellished a bit, but the level of detail leads you to believe this book was a lot closer to an autobiography than fiction.

Throughout the book you realize the physical and mental struggle a Postal Carrier or Postal Clerk go through, and what a mind numbing experience it was. Of course these struggles were exasperated by all the late nights drinking and carousing with women that Chinaski participated in on a daily basis. One of the key themes in the book was the constant interactions with the supervisors and Chinaski’s disdain for them, which only got him in more trouble. Henry Chinaski was a crude character always drinking and chasing women, and if he wasn’t doing those things he was betting on horses.

Recommendation

I found this book very entertaining, actually laughing frequently while I was reading. If I have any advice I would spend some time reading about Charles Bukowski’s life before reading Post Office. It just helps to bring the whole thing into context as the character traits of Chinaski are pretty much the same as Bukowski and it makes reading Post Office much more fun. Lots of dialog between Chinaski and all the other characters, but all easy to follow. Understanding Bukowski and his attitude towards women and structure give you a better understanding of the time period and characters.

Ultimately this is also a novel about the plight of the working man and his complete hatred for the bureaucracy of the post office. I highly recommend it with the caveat I mentioned earlier regarding gaining some knowledge of the author first. I enjoyed it so much that I read it in a couple days. I’m looking forward to reading more from Mr. Bukowski who not only wrote novels, but was also well known for his poetry.

About the author

From Wikipedia:

Henry Charles Bukowski born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his adopted home city of Los Angeles. Bukowski’s work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. The FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column Notes of a Dirty Old Man in the LA underground newspaper Open City.

Bukowski published extensively in small literary magazines and with small presses beginning in the early 1940s and continuing on through the early 1990s. He wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books during the course of his career. Some of these works include his Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window, published by his friend and fellow poet Charles Potts, and better-known works such as Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame. These poems and stories were later republished by John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press (now HarperCollins/Ecco Press) as collected volumes of his work. As noted by one reviewer, “Bukowski continued to be, thanks to his antics and deliberate clownish performances, the king of the underground and the epitome of the littles in the ensuing decades, stressing his loyalty to those small press editors who had first championed his work and consolidating his presence in new ventures such as the New York Quarterly, Chiron Review, or Slipstream.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bukowski

This is a nice overview of Charles Bukowski https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/charles-bukowski