Post Office

by Charles Bukowski

The book tosses you about like a choppy sea; you’re laughing, then you’re feeling the heartbreak of the narrator’s return to Betty, and then his anguished rage at her premature death, and then you’re immersed in Bukowski’s metaphor for existence – horseracing – and then you’re back to laughing.

We’re forced into absurd lives, against which the only sane response is to wage a guerrilla operation of humour and lust and madness. The post office, or any world of work, is only one institutionalised system of control that is designed to beat people, to condition them into accepting that humiliation and failure is the norm. Those who do not rebel against this lose any ability to think for themselves. The workers are robbed of power whilst the bosses have only a small amount of it and can only use it arbitrarily, which is to say, pointlessly.