Three books that changed my life

The following from an article on books I did awhile ago that I just happened to stumble across...not sure if it was ever published but having returned to the hallowed pages of Mr Bukowski yet again...it always happens in times of need...I thought I might as well add it to the site. I was asked to come up with some literary inpirables so here goes, hope the world is being kind to you in such a traumatic week as this, VPx BOOK 1 As an impressionable punk-rock music loving teen I read the NME with gusto, as everybody did in those days. In a CURE interview Robert Smith mentioned Albert Camus as an influence and being a bit of a CURE fan I dutifully purchased A Happy Death from Bromsgrove Books mispronouncing his name as K-MUS much to my eternal embarrassment. I read it in the park the next day [I was on the dole] and it was like nothing I’d come across before. The hero was this guy Mersault, he lived the life of a Mediterranean aesthete, swimming in solitary oblivion, apparently devoid of conventional moral responsibilities, totally selfish and yet selfless. He murdered a cripple [with kindness]. He didn’t attend his mother’s funeral [out of laziness]. He opted out [because he could] and his lovers were transitional and mostly irrelevant, he was a bonafide hedonist, devoid of guilt and concerned only for the moment. I found these notions liberating, intoxicating and at a total counterpoint to my stilted late teen life experience in a pretty but oh so dull little Worcestershire village. I now realize through re reads and critical investigations that the novel contains all kinds of serious metaphors that examine life and death and morality, stuff I never really got first time around [ stuff I don’t get now]. For me the book will always be about permission, permission to be your self, permission to exist, permission to live your own life. I used to say to my dad ‘I’m an existentialist’, he just gave me the look; this is the book that liberated me from the spiritual confinement of Methodism. Its hip appeal was further enhanced by the knowledge that Mr Camus was a former professional footballer who looked like the Jesus of cool smoking gitanes cigarettes. BOOK 2 Failing miserably at school, issues with acne and teachers and girls, it was some posh kids from The Royal Grammar School in Worcester who invited me to play guitar at their end of year concert. Backstage after the audition I found a copy of Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar [a Picador UK edition] which duly ended up in my guitar case. I read it in one sitting which is not that difficult as it only contains142 pages and some chapters are barely a paragraph long. The book was shockingly different. I had never come across anything like it and remember how excited and intrigued I was to have made this oddball discovery. Did this make me cool? Absolutely not, Richard Allen’s Skinhead [the coolest book at school] took that accolade. A narrative about a stream along which some watermelons grow, where giant phone booths cover the river banks and get vandalized by tigers. The phone booths are carved out of giant water melons and factories produce different coloured watermelons on different days of the week for different applications. There’s a place called iDeath [a good place] and a bloke called inBOIL [who cuts off his thumb]. IWS often appears to make no sense, it’s almost as if the sentences are not really speaking to each other, and yet it draws the reader in with simplicity of style more commonly found in children’s fiction. I was immediately captivated. It remains my favourite Brautigan novel and set me off on pursuit of his collected works, most of which, over the following years, I’m happy to say I managed to track down. For Brautigans and others try www.beatscene.com Anything by Charles Bukowski, my favourite all time writer, [especially the poetry], gets my vote. I came across him via a friend in the early 80’s and have become progressively consumed. Bukowski, who died in 1994 aged 73, has a load of personal contradictions, a classical music loving alcoholic, a former street dweller [bum] who spent his formative years in the flop houses of the USA working unskilled jobs, a self destructive rebel and a bully who was in turn bullied by his father [Ham on Rye is the autobiographical classic]. He was first published aged 35 after numerous rejections. I love the fact that he never gave up and it shows in his work, there’s real defiance in his character. So at any given time there is a Bukowski poetry book on the go in this house, he’s great to dip into, he’s like an addiction, always the same voice, for me the voice of truth, the voice of warts and all. A man who treasured solitude, loved animals and turned his personal demons into great writing. His style is so un-flowery, so readable and so straightforward. None of the poncy elaborate over-wordy bullshit that you get from the typical English poetry elite [and the Welsh for that matter] clutters up his work. He cuts to the chase. OK so he usually writes about the same things, women, horse racing, boxing, madness, drinking ; but for me he understands the essence of sadness and truth. And he has helped me when I’ve been lost. I dutifully urge anyone and everyone to check him out. Post Office is a great starting point, for poems try Love is a Dog from Hell. Both are from the mid 70’s when he was firing up the old typer like magician. Brutal tender majesty it just is.