A book I've been meaning to read for a while is Ask the Dust by John Fante. John Fante was an American writer. He died in 1983. He only published a handful novels, some good, some not so good. Ask the Dust, from 1939, is supposed to be his best one.
(As it happens, Fante's dad came from a tiny, god-forsaken village in Abruzzo called Torricella Peligna. Not that it means anything, of course. Everyone comes from somewhere, right?)
Ask the Dust is a semi-autobiographical novel. The protagonist is John Fante's alter ego Arturo Bandini, an aspiring writer struggling to make a living in 1930s Los Angeles. Early in the book Bandini falls in love with a Mexican waitress. She hates him, though. Rightly so. He's mean to her. At least at first. She's in love with someone else. In the end they become sort of friends. But that's not important.
I'd give the book four stars out of five. There are some passages that I really liked, and others that I didn't. (Well, isn't that the case with most of the books we read?) But the good bits are really good. I wish I had an edited version of the novel with just the bits that I liked. I could then read it over and over again.
(Occasionally you do come across a book where you wouldn't change a thing. Not a sentence, not a word, not a comma. But that's rare.)
The edition that I have is a recent one. Instead of publishing a new introduction for it, the publisher decided to reprint an old introduction that Charles Bukowski wrote back in 1979 for an earlier edition. I'm really glad for that.
More often than not, books' introductions are quite boring and way too long. Bukowski's introduction almost reads like a short story. (A really short one.) After reading it I went back to read it a second time.
I copied it here. It's not too long. (I actually shortened it a little bit. I cut out a few small bits here and there. Nothing major.)
When people say to me "I don't like reading" I always say to them "You do, you just haven't found the book that's right for you yet." The book that speaks to us is out there somewhere. We just need a bit of luck to find it. Bukowski was lucky that day.
Introduction
I was a young man, starving and drinking and trying to be a writer. I did most of my reading at the LA Public Library, and nothing that I read related to me or to the streets or to the people about me.
It seemed as if everybody was playing word-tricks, that those who said almost nothing at all were considered excellent writers. One had to go back to the pre-Revolution writers of Russia to find any gamble, any passion.
There were exceptions, but those exceptions were so few that reading them was quickly done, and you were left staring at rows and rows of exceedingly dull books. I pulled book after book from the shelves. Why didn't anybody say something? Why didn't anybody scream out?
I tried other rooms in the library. The section on religion was just a vast bog to me. I got into philosophy. I found a couple of bitter Germans who cheered me for a while, then that was over. I tried mathematics but it was just like religion, it ran right off me. I tried geology and found it curious but, finally, non-sustaining.
I found some books on surgery and I liked the books on surgery. The words were new and the illustrations were wonderful. I particularly liked and memorized the operation on the mesocolon. Then I dropped out of surgery and I was back in the big room with the novelists and short story writers.
(A library was a good place to be when you had nothing to drink or to eat, and the landlady was looking for you and for the back rent money. In the library at least you had the use of the toilet facilities.)
I kept on walking around the big room, pulling the books off the shelves, reading a few lines, a few pages, then putting them back. Then one day I pulled a book down and opened it, and there it was.
I stood for a moment, reading. Then, like a man who had found gold in the city dump, I carried the book to a table. The lines rolled easily across the page, there was a flow. Here at last was a man who was not afraid of emotion. The humour and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity. The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me.
I checked the book out, took it to my room, climbed into my bed and read it. The book was Ask the Dust and the author was John Fante. Fante had a mighty effect upon me.
Not long after reading that book I began living with a woman. She was a worse drunk than I was, and we had some violent arguments, and once I screamed at her "Don't call me a son of a bitch! I am Bandini! Arturo Bandini!"
Fante was my god, and I knew that the gods should be left alone, one didn't bang at their door. Yet I liked to guess where he lived. Almost every day I walked around and I thought, is that the place?
I finally met him this year. There is much more to the story of John Fante. It is a story of terrible luck and a terrible fate and of a rare and natural courage. Some day it will be told, but I feel that he doesn't want me to tell it here.
That's enough.
Now this book is yours.
Charles Bukowski, 1979
