factótum - bukowski

In this autobiographical novel of his youth, the author describes the life of his alter ego Henry Chinaski as he jumps from one job to another, all squalid, hard, meaningless, drinking himself to death, with an obsession to have sex, trying to materialize his life as a writer and offers us a brutally funny and melancholically horrified vision of the work ethic, of how it bends men's "souls." It has been said that Bukowski, with his laconic, terse, and forceful prose like an uppercut, is the atrocious novelist of the great urban jungle, of the disinherited, prostitutes, drunkards, the human waste of the American Dream at gutter level, and he has been compared to Henry Miller, Celine, and Hemingway.