Portions From a Wine Stained Notebook - Charles Bukowski

 

This is yet another posthumous release, this being a collection of Buk's works, starting from literally his first published piece, with an amazing amount of items following. His early writings are more, dare I say, intellectual, with several essays written about poetry and its place in the world of modern arts, among other subjects. I had actually forgotten how much he wrote about the politics of writing and the scene that he found himself entrenched in. He is neither afraid to praise those he deems worthy nor demean those he doesn't care for. Of course, it's all simply his opinion and it is a bit, well, pretentious at times, but his style is stronger than many others, so he can be forgiven. Of course, there are windows into the rest of his life, as well - the booze, the women, true tenderness for his daughter, the racetrack (always), etc. While he, naturally, never veered from being Bukowski, his style did - I suppose also naturally - evolve into a simpler line, which is what he always claimed to be striving for. Not sure that I would necessarily declare that the later work is better, but it seems that he did move in the direction he meant to.

In any case, this is one of the stronger collections of his prose/short stories that I have found - pretty comparable to books like Notes of a Dirty Old Man (some of those columns appear in this new compilation, as well), which has some of my fave writing from the man. Definitely recommended!