South of No North; Stories of the Buried Life. by Charles Bukowski (1980, Paperback)

Most people tend to think of Bukowski's gutbucket whiskey-soaked poetry, or else the simple, elegant and bittersweet narration of literary alter-ego Henry Chinaski in workingman's blues epics like Post Office, Ham on Rye, and Factotum. South of No North is due East of his poetry but obviously West of the early novels that most are familiar with. An almost mystically insightful collection of short stories, each of which leave the reader wishing they were just a page or two longer because of the fascination these characters hold, South of No North takes us into the lives of dozens of comically ludicrous, tragic misfits, giving us only a momentary glimpse of the lives of society's outcasts. We meet a distant, beer-drinking megalomaniac boxer, undefeated in the ring but facing an emotional knockout by a girlfriend who comes to despise his self-aggrandizement; we follow a local journalist to an interview with a cannibal-turned-househusband-turned-cannibal. We meet a lonely, chubby woman who, against her better judgment, indulges her curiosity by answering a personal ad left in a car window (of all places) by an innocent seeming bachelor who turns out to be nothing more than another horny brute. If it seems as if I'm giving too much away, I'm not. You could read the whole plot of each tale in this book and still come into it totally fresh and not knowing what to expect. I read a while back that somebody turned this into a play in New York City. I will always kick myself for not having made more of an effort to check it out, seeing as how I live there, but of course that was before I owned this book. Simply put, you need to have a copy of this book. The cover, like most Black Sparrow-published Bukowski books, is beautifully spare, classy, and poignant in its barebones presentation and design, and if you are the kind of book lover, as I am, who appreciates the sexiness of a simple book cover which only hints at the world within it populated by the kinds of offbeat characters described earlier in this review, then you need to pick up South of No North. Even if you are not a die-hard Bukowski fan like I am, it is a great place to start, and I would also recommend that, once you own it, you not lend it out as people tend to never give Bukowski books back.