The Hunchback of East Hollywood
by Aubrey Malone
After reading in the NYT Book Review that Beckett’s letters had been released into a new edition, I’ve been desperate for a good biography on a writer I enjoy. It’s a topic I’m rather obsessed with, the life behind the work. The living part of the creation process, a peek into the moment and time that the word was placed on the page.
I’m not sure why I ended up starting with this book. I was seduced into the Biography B section of the library and couldn't find anything suitable on Beckett. Behind me was ol' Bukowski, my lousy old love. I should never have taken it home, like a homeless cat wrapped around my ankle. It was a harmless flip-through at best, and I'm suddenly 10 pages in that night. Then 25 pages later. Constantly, I was questioning myself: Why am I still reading this book? 200 pages later I'm pissed I finished.
If I could slap the gal who wrote it, I would. If I had her in front of me speaking the way she writes, I’d have to inflict some sort of bodily injury. It makes my eyes throb in pain. My brain is offended. It takes everything in me not to hurl the book across the room when I hit another one of her contrived descriptions, horrid metaphors, terrible similes or abominable analogies.
Bukowski himself would have taken this and laughed. Such effort for something so incredibly pseudo-hip and falsely academic. It reads like a pretentious thesis, rambly and verbose. The tiny arial font and thick pages make it even that much more incredulous. I could include 15-million quotations that I found worth ridiculing, but it’s just a waste of my time.
I learned some things, I forgot some things. In all, I should have stuck with the original book 8: Wilde. No wonder Bukowski drank, he had to listen to people like this mangle his life.
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