The word factotum is a noun meaning – a person involved to do all types of jobs. The many synonyms include – boot boy, dogs body, lapdog, servant and slave. Bukowski writes in the persona of Henry Chinaski, a son of German immigrants, who travels from the west coast to the east coast working menial jobs. Generally, the job lasts no more than a week, as his habit of drinking prevents him from rising in time to meet his obligations. The period is WWII, when getting work is relatively easy for the obvious reasons.
Chinaski is a wandering vagabond with a keen sense of the streets, and a deep sense of self. He has a few years of college studying journalism, and at some points in the novel, he comments on his short stories and the many rejection slips he receives. He finally gets a few stories published and for the first in the entire novel, the character feels real happiness.
When Chinaski is not collecting garbage as a ‘sanitation officer’ or cleaning toilets in the restrooms of warehouses, he’s drinking in a bar or imbibing in his five dollar a week hotel with the latest woman, a fellow drunk, that he has met along the way. It touches on the cliche’ but two alcoholics sleeping in the same bed in a dive apartment are bound to argue and possibly get violent with each other. He leaves his job and his latest partner, grabbing his cardboard yellow-suitcase, and hits the road again in search of another lowly job and his next drink.
If you have read any of Bukowski’s poetry you would know his low opinion of society and its many rules and general morality. The character Chinaski is a rebel though at the same time values hard work and extols a pure kind of self-reliance. Bukowski is most certainly a ‘literary’ rebel, a writer avoiding norms and throughout his work, giving voice to the poor and disadvantaged. For this reader, this gives him a uniquely American voice and style of prose that is direct and deceptively simple.
One could really describe Factotum as a patchwork of scenes and experiences from the authors life. Most of his novels are fictional biographies which really became clear to this reader after reading his first novel Post Office.
In Factotum we enter WWII America and meet the many people that inhabit the country during this unusual period. Even though the novel’s backdrop is war, no one talks about it and are more concerned about making a decent living, getting by from day to day.
The novel is funny and lowlife, scattered with acute observations of the human condition.
An interesting read.
