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    Factotum
    Factotum
    Factotum
    Audiobook5 hours

    Factotum

    Written by Charles Bukowski

    Narrated by Christian Baskous

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and drunken brawls, as he makes his bitter, brilliant way from one drink to the next.

    Charles Bukowski's posthumous legend continues to grow. Factotum is a masterfully vivid evocation of slow-paced, low-life urbanity and alcoholism, and an excellent introduction to the fictional world of Charles Bukowski.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateAug 13, 2013
    ISBN9780062302939
    Author

    Charles Bukowski

    Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother, and brought to the United States at the age of two. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for over fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp. Abel Debritto, a former Fulbright scholar and current Marie Curie fellow, works in the digital humanities. He is the author of Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground, and the editor of the Bukowski collections On Writing, On Cats, and On Love.

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    Reviews for Factotum

    4/5

    948 ratings27 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This guy (Bukowski) portrays the low life with real authenticity.
    • 3/5
      It is what is it is. no bullshit. no nonsense. no deep sense of the world. no double meaning. Some realities are bad and ugly, and there is nothing nice about them. They are not a Kardashian show, they are Real.
    • 4/5
      Pretty standard buskowski book. Quick to listen to. Only a few hours.
    • 5/5
      Voice acting matched with this book like fine wine.
    • 5/5
      Henry Chinaski travels throughout the U.S., usually by bus, occasionally writing, and losing odd jobs with frequency. “I always started a job with the feeling that I’d soon quit or be fired, and this gave me a relaxed manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power.” He engages in his time-honored pursuits: drinking, sex, gambling and getting arrested. “Disturbing the peace was one of my favorites.” These are usually what cause him to lose jobs.Henry’s a misanthrope, or at least claims to be. Maybe he has cause. A woman asks him: “Your parents hated you, right?” “Right.”Chinaski claims he’d rather be alone: “I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me.” But Chinaski always has a woman, preferably one that drinks as hard as him.What characterizes Chinaski is his refusal to accept the conditions of life as it has become: “Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed.” He rages against it the entire book.
    • 5/5
      If you’re new to Bukowski I’d recommend starting with Post Office, which is also read by Christian Baskous.
      Really great book which is sold by the excellent performance of the narrator. Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
      As I've said before, in my mind, Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski are the same person. You can imagine my surprise when Martha strolls in, a mere thirty-five pages into the novel. Now Waits' Martha doesn't strike me as the same kind of gal as Buk's, but you get the idea. That scene, by the way...freaking hilarious.I really liked this one. It was like the Bukowski version of a job hunting manual. He chronicles Henry Chinaski's seemingly mundane existence as he goes through jobs and booze and women. The writing is very simple and very straightforward, quite perfect in every way.My only regret is that I watched the film version first. Every now and again, my Hank would be replaced by Matt Dillon and, let's face it, that's just not acceptable. For the most part, though, Bukowski's voice kept the second rate actors out of the narrative. Dillon could not survive for long in the book version.
    • 5/5
      The writing is rugged yet fluent and it feels real in the sense that it was as if he told his life story and not at all some made up fiction. I will forever consider Factotum, Post Office and Women my absolute favorites, especially for the strong nostalgic feeling I get because they triggered my interest in literature.
    • 5/5
      First, you should know the definition of factotum - it's an employee who does all kinds of work.This is Bukowski, it's exactly what you would expect from him. If you've never read anything from this author before, hold on. Actually, I would recommend starting with Ham on Rye before reading this or any of his other novels.
    • 5/5
      It's hard not to enjoy Bukowski's writing. Like with Hemingway and others, why we find it fascinating to read about the shenanigans of people who struggle to write is beyond me. Is it because secretly anyone who reads wishes they could write? Is this part of Robert M. Hutchins' Great Conversation? I don't know.

      Yet while some would suggest that Bukowski is the world's greatest misogynist, he doesn't depict anyone else in this novel any worse than he does himself. His mention of ending it all early in the novel hints at the level of self-deprecation that just didn't seem to come through in my reading of Post Office.

      In this novel, I feel Bukowski's sense of dereliction of duty but from a sensitive soul who is otherwise intelligent. The constant references to Debussy and Mahler indicate someone who is far more than the alcoholic bum Bukowski portrays in this novel.

      Yet it is believable (I am cutting out my adverbs as I write - Bukowski reminds me of a combination of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, hence my hesitation to add "entirely" - he's either believable or he isn't). The protagonist moves from job to job, surrounded by others who share his sense of despair at the world - a world they are part of yet cannot belong to without giving up their sense of identity.

      I identify with Bukowski for this reason. Not so much the "beer-sodden" bum who wanders about aimlessly. But the soul who cannot ever belong but is stuck in present company that somehow can turn off their own bullshit meter sufficiently (damn those adverbs!) to carve out an existence of what is essentially living for somebody else.

      I find Bukowski's characters admirable because they give up hope without giving up their freedom. Although Henry Chinaski is made to feel as if he doesn't belong because he is excluded from the World War II draft, he still lives as the intelligent loner who doesn't fit in but is stuck anyway.

      But the struggle is admirable. Struggle is what we were put on this earth to do. We either struggle against what we do not want, or we struggle for a better life. Henry Chinaski is a drunken no-hoper bum but he gives me hope - hope that I can live as I choose and not how others choose for me. And that is why I enjoy Bukowski's work.
    • 3/5
      This is the third book of Bukowski's that I've read. I liked it. Of the three, Post Office is my clear favourite.

      Although it's a bit repetitive, Factotum is the work of a true working class, impoverished, writer. It is an unpolished and harsh work that could loosely compare to Orwell's Down and Out and London's People of the Abyss, but Factotum has the added bite of being written by someone who lived that life, instead of by those who only visited it.

      It won't be the last book of Bukowski's I read.
    • 5/5
      I saw the film a few years ago, the one with Matt Dillon. He was convincing in the role of Bukowksi, here Henry Chinaski. More convincing than I had expected him to be. Finally I got around to reading the source material, and I'm so glad I did - the book is excellent. In his pared-down prose, Bukowski wastes not a single word in telling his story of drink and poverty and running from job to job. He removes the romance from the myth of the starving artist. And that final line - wow. What a sucker punch.
    • 2/5
      Like I said in my last update, I did not like the main character. He degrades women and seems to have nothing else to stand by besides drinking. It also seemed to have some gross moments, which I could handle, but didn't seem to have any significance to the plot or character development. I would've given this book 1 star, but I understand his attitude toward working for something you don't believe in, and I found myself laughing along with him at the people who seemed so eager to be recognized as perfect cogs in the machine. I would not read this book again.
    • 4/5
      Adventures in the life of Henry Chinaski. Drunken words of wisdom and struggle.
    • 4/5
      Bukowski is one of the few writers I would call a truth-teller. He just tells what happened, in plain prose, using short, direct sentences. What's amazing is how rare or how hard it is for most authors to convey unalloyed reality.
    • 5/5
      People want to give Karl Ove Knausgaard a Nobel Prize for writing in a genre which I call the novelized autobiography. But Bukowski was documenting HIS STRUGGLE forty years before Karl Ove, and, much more, didn't have the audacity to claim such a Christ/Hitler like title. My Struggle. My Ass. Factotum is a fun book. It is a light book. It is also by turns a sad and disturbing book. It is a book with no questions. Only one answer: work for the poor is soul crushing and there is no nobility in having your soul crushed for a pay check. Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's alter ego, works his way through nearly every low paying job in America, taking pride only in his getting fired.This book is best considered as a volume in a larger story of the Chinaski novels. Before you judge Chinask/Bukowski, read Ham on Rye, the harrowing story of the childhood that created monster factotum.
    • 4/5
      Fantastical story of working class boredom...
    • 5/5
      You either love him or you love to hate him. It's Bukowski's straightforward engaging emotional style that is interesting. I see a lot of reviews that seem to have a problem with his lifestyle or want to celebrate it. To me, it just seems to be what it is; I've known a few Bukowski's so I am not impressed or put off by his story telling but it's the style that has merit; it's compact and efficient like Carver without an editor removing all the emotion. He often fails but when he succeeds the writing is as good as anyone in recent times.
    • 5/5
      Bukowski unflinchingly wrote about life in all its raunchiness, I must say. Some of it will still seem sordid, especially to the reader looking for warm and fuzzy. These, if autobiographical, anecdotes are from his days as a young man. He definitely had a hard time trying, or not trying, to adapt to society. I'm not sure the guy would've had the nicest personality or attitude, but I like the simplicity and directness of his prose. This book reminds me of my own experiences with employment though I have generally lasted longer and have not had a serious alcohol problem.
    • 4/5
      It is sort of repetitive, basically a litany of crappy jobs Bukowski (aka Chinaski) loses because of his laziness and/or drunkenness. Readers who want nice characters and happy endings should stay very, very far away.
    • 3/5
      well written, but not much to say. Henry goes from town to town and accept all kind of jobs that will allow him to live a bohemian life. authentic but not up to the point you would expect from Bukowski. He plays the tough guy role, but the only thing he wanted was to get a good writer.
    • 3/5
      Bukowski is great, but of the novels of his I've read (Post Office, Women, Ham on Rye) this was the least good. The drift from job to job, woman to woman and beer to beer didn't quite add up to something satisfying. There are some great scenes and observations, but they are too sparse even in such a short novel to make it excellent in the way those other novels are. Worth a read if you're a fan, but I'd recommend starting elsewhere if you haven't read him yet.
    • 5/5
      Some may disagree but they are probably wrong or just trying to be different, this is Bukowski's best novel. It picks up at the end of Ham on Rye when his lifestyle is just taking full swing and discusses his alcoholism, subjugation of women, violence, alcoholism, and negligence of duty in WWII a very admittance regardless of time, place and persona.
    • 3/5
      Definatly Buk. The drinking, the women, but much of the Bukowski pathos is missing and the stories seem disconnected and sometimes just depressing without the usual Buk insight. Average Buk read only for the real fan.
    • 2/5
      I didn't like it much. Full of overdrinking and seamy sex. It is supposed to be funny but I only laughed at one situation and a few others were mildly humourous. The whole way through it was the same to the last sentance: Going from one job to another, one drinking bout to another, one loveless sex act to another. It was unrelenting bum living.
    • 3/5
      And now it's being made into a movie. Odd.
    • 2/5
      In the words of Bukowski, pretty shitty, vulgar and uninteresting