I used to read Bukowski - translated into Italian - when I was a college student. Bukowski depicted a world of decadence, problems, poverty, alcohol addiction and free sex that could make my neat and standardized life in the province, at university, in the family, with ordinary people, among conventional ideas, a little less standardized. It was a comparison term, a paradoxical mix of a threat to avoid and a goal to achieve. I found it so fascinating. At some point I stopped reading his stories but I guess that his message never left me. Over the following years I’ve always tried to peek (in a safe way) at that dark side of modern and developed societies that he was writing about, at least to remind myself that the life I was living was a privilege, and that good can be found also where we’re taught only the bad thrives.
For me Bukowski is like a model of a genuinely free individual. A person who tries to express himself fully, careless of schemes, standards, conventions. An anti-hero. The best type.
This is a collection of short stories - only partly fictional, I suspect - where you can find a lot of examples of what I wrote above.
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