Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > Pulp

Pulp is Charles Bukowski’s last book. So you get curious about that, a dying man’s last words. Is it the foxhole confession at last for a life-long unapologetic vulgarian? Nah. True to his stolid commitment to self-deprecation, satire of pretentiousness and constant drunkenness, Bukowksi, knowing he has little time left, pens his first non-Henry Chinaski fiction, and dedicates it to “bad writing.” His target here is noir fiction, ala Mickey Spillane, with Bukowski’s version named Nicky Belane. It’s a wild often hilarious mishmash of satire of pseudo-existentialist crime fiction--"We are all born to die. We are all born to live"--where Bellane searches for a Red Sparrow (as in Maltese Falcon) and avoids Lady Death. The idea, as it is so many detective stories, is that the detective is searching for clues to a mystery as he searches for the mystery of his own existence.

This mystery idea always has had some interesting thematic potential. It actually describes some of the work of Nobel Prize winning writer Patric Modiano (i.e., Missing Person), who uses this theme with serious intent, and successfully. Bukowski, isn't disinterested in the relationship between his work as a writer and his mortality, but he mostly plays the theme for laughs here through detective Belane.

“It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year. My life. God damn it.”

“I'm not dead yet, just in a state of rapid decay, who isn't?”

“I gave him my code name. 'This is Mr. Slow Death.’”

There are literary tributes to his favorite writers, Celine and Fante, and plenty of booze and broads and bad jokes, natch. And space aliens instead of angels.

This should not be the first or only Bukowski you read, and it is not his best work, but my basic three star rating of this book adds a star because of the laugh-out load humor he faces death with. I like and admire that.

There’s a bunch of good reviews, but I like this one a lot, from Arthur. I was going to just cut and paste some of what he quotes from the book, but wth, here’s the review:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...