So please forgive my idiocy and offer me some insight. I'm a new-ish Buk fan but I am trying to read everything I can find by him yet I do not know his style well enough to know if the above-described scene was meant to be taken as surrealism or what. In the film version, he breaks up with Jan out of general disgust and nausea, but in the book, the decision to leave is directly related to his behavior at the track, regarding the assault.

So, did I read this wrong, or am I just really gullible, or did he kill the guy, or what? Yet he finds the previous day's race results in the paper that day, and they match his recollection of the event.

Is he implying that he may have really killed this guy? If memory serves (I rented the book from the library a couple of months back and cannot reference it now) he describes eventually dropping the man quite a ways down beneath the grandstand, and watching his body bounce several times and go limp.īut then in the next chapter he implies to the reader, via recounting a conversation with Jan about the previous day's fateful trip to the races, that the scene was imagined, conceived in his head out of a drunken haze. I got in beside her and slept.Įxcerpts from Factotum Copyright 1975 by Charles Bukowski and reprinted with the permission of Black Sparrow Press.I have a question about the italicized chapter of Factotum, where he describes going to the track with Jan and encountering a stubborn old man whom he eventually attacks over an argument regarding seating.(the scene was SOMEWHAT interpreted theatrically in the film version). She pulled the covers up over her head, rolled on her side. Firemen in large metal helmets with numbers on them. My shorts were also ragged and had cigarette burns in them where the hot ashes had fallen in my lap.

The shorts were stained-we wiped with newspapers that we crumpled and softened with our hands-and I often didn't get all of it cleaned off. 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars. Coleção L&PM Pocket, Paperback, 184 pages. A couple of hours later there was a loud noise in the hall. Factótum (Paperback) Published 2007 by L&PM Editores. I shut off the alarm and went back to sleep. or according to our clock 7:27 and one half. I was too sick one morning to get up at 4:30 a.m. The short excerpt below is Chapter 43 of Factotum. (In Post Office, however, he admits to staying with the Postal Service for over ten years.) This humorous, incredibly honest book is one of Bukowski's most fascinating works. He had legion of differnet jobs, but never seemed to hold on to any single career for long.

Although he never stood in front of discount stores holding cardboard signs, at that point in his life Bukowski was more or less a member of the 'will work for food' set. First published in 1975, Factotum is a picaresque describing Bukowski (as Henry Chinaski ) during his drifting drunken days, bouncing from job to job.

Factotum by Charles Bukowski