Quote:
I thought the two most moving passages were the 'fly rescue' and the 'dog blessing'. If you remember, another boy calls him over to where a gang are watching a fly struggling in a web as a spider approaches. Bukowski breaks the web and the others chase him. It is a more moving incident than the killing of the cat. Here he does what he does at the risk of a beating. His innate sensitivity overpowers him and he acts almost automatically.
Well i thought the cat scene was more moving because he really wants to help the poor thing and yet he is completely helpless. But i do agree that the spider passage was very moving as well. I think a lot of people misjudge Bukowski.
Quote:
I am 2/3's of the way through Factotum and, tbh, a little disappointed. The anecdotes are less striking and entertaining and the crudity, which he gets away with in Ham On Rye, is simply ugly and even tedious. However, the big failing, compared to Ham On Rye, is the absence of redemption. In HOR Chianski's squalid, bitter, brutal, ugly little life is redeemed by those flashes of compassion and humanity- his pity for a stray dog, for a cat or fly, his contempt for bullies and gangs. He seems a romantic outsider, pouring his misery into his books. A life saved by literature. There is none of this in Factotum. Here is simply an *******. Now I know he's keeping it real, but the world is crammed to bursting with horrible people whose lives I am not interested in. In HOR you felt this was a kid whose life was worth something. There was clearly a sensitvity and intelligence that should have been nurtured rather than crushed. Perhaps Bukowski is trying to tell us this very thing when Jan says "your parents hated you- the lack of love has warped you". The problem is, without the tenderness, without the kindness, it is hard to empathise with him- to see him as a fellow sufferer. Instead he has become one of the very *******s who make life so miserable.
Well, to me, Factotum was a book filled to the brim with helpless suffering. Chinaski is suffering through life, job after job, pretending not to care, when really he is medicating himself every night with alcohol and constantly looking for women just so he can have company, rather than be alone. In this respect, i think the humanity does not come in little flashes, like in HOR, but instead exists throughout the book. I felt such compassion for Chinaski because i could see that he was suffering. Everything he does is an attempt to distance himself from the pain of his reality. And that is why i loved the book. 
