Down the Post Office

I read somewhere recently that you should be careful when writing autobiographically because there can be a tendency to abandon emotionally evolving your characters, and instead just plow through a chronology of events, going "then this happened, then this happened", until you get the story out. This is exactly the way in which Charles Bukowski's Post Office is written, but it breaks the rules and works, and is a really enjoyable easy read. Bukowski is an interesting character and a great example of how anyone, with a bit of luck, can become a writer. For years he drifted through life drinking heavily and working for the American Post Office, writing poetry on the side, before an editor who liked his poems decided to give him a wage for life, as long as he quit his job and started writing novels. A month later Bukowski had written Post Office, and continued as a novelist until his death in 1993.

Post Office is about nothing more than drinking, gambling, shacking up with women, and being annoyed, but it works. When I read Bukowski I usually have Hunter S Thompson's voice in my head, and the two are quite similar in terms of their self-obsession, with their differing choice of drugs the main thing that sets them apart. Bukowski actually makes working for the Post Office sound like good fun in a twisted, endurance test kind of way. It reminds of when I used to work twelve hour night shifts at a pea processing factory: no matter how hellish it seemed at the time, I can't help but look back on the time with a rose-tinted fondness in my heart. It's the kind of book that you can whip through in a couple of days and it doesn't  change your perspective on anything or affect you when you put it down, but sometimes that's just the kind of book you need: a chronicle of a dirty old pervert who gets smashed all day and works all night.