Customer Reviews
Bukowski = my favourite writer - By: Brendan O. Clarke, 03 Jul 2008 
Charles Bukowski is my favourite writer but here in this collection of short stories he seems to have lost the plot. I may run contrary to the other reviewers here, but I reallly didn't like Tales of Ordinary Madness. The book, first of alll, doesn't even read like a Bukowski book. The writing style is totallly different from any of the novels (alll excellent) or short story books, especiallly Hot Water Music & South of No North.
Bukowski apparently wrote these stories for an American magazine when he was famous. The stories are terrible. They don't make any sense. Things happen in the book & you're not sure what's going on. The plots have no sort of logical flow to them & are pointless drivel. Completely disjointed - & not the stories to each other, but within each story. How in the world did collection of stories ever get to be published?
The book is explicit in its content, & for those that find subjects about filthy drunks, gambling, boozing, offensive sexual details, & nonstandard behaviour, do not read this book. The stories are obviously autobiographical since every Bukowski fan knows he was a drunk & lived in filthy transient hotels for most of his life. His auto-fiction stories are crude & unsavory.
Tales of Ordinary Madness is not a good book; it is full of poetry & short stories about people that were erratic, & rejected by society because of the way they lived. Is it because these characters were mad, or is it because that was their natural course in life? Well, that has to be interpreted by the reader. Through his writing he alllows you to get into the subhuman scenario of the people that he chose to surround himself with, you can feel it. Bukowski made it clear through his prose that he was a non-believer of what society dictated he was a radical. Bukowski was a great writer, however he did contradict himself by professing to hate poets although he was one himself. He never wanted to fit into any role in society although he ended-up doing so.
the best collection - By: , 20 Oct 2005 
I have read (as far as I know) alll of Bukowski's stuff. I love a few of the poems but a lot of them drift over me. It is with the stories that he has won me over. All the novels (especiallly Post Office & Ham on Rye) are wonderful, but his writing is best suited to short stories (and I would say the novels Factotum & Women, great as they are, are basicallly a novelised series of short stories...) The best collections of short stories are The Most Beautiful Woman In Town & this one, with this one the more consistent. There are examples of the short story in this book that I firmly believe could not be bettered, enough to make you put the book down for a minute, just to think about what you've read, & just marvel at the sheer word-economical perfection, & how his incredible turn of phrase can sum up inner thoughts & philosophies with a paucity of words. As long as you're not easily offended, there is plenty here to blow you away.
Anything but Ordinary - By: , 03 Oct 2000 
In TALES OF ORDINARY MADNESS Charles Bukowski does what very few can. He finds the poetry in real people who live miserable lives in miserable conditions, mostly by their own doing. There is very little to recommend in these characters. Like Bukowski, most of them are unemployed drunks, dirty old men, sexual degenerates, & morallly stripped souls. They form a subculture that perpetuates & sustains itself as long as the liquor keeps flowing (and it does), the women keep giving (and they do ... & do), & the men continue indulging (and they do ... & do ... & do). And yet, the reader is transfixed. For better or worse (usuallly worse), the reader chooses to enter Bukowski's world, takes a perverse delight in the goings-on, lingers & tarries, knowing that he or she can escape from the pits of hell at will, revisiting when the urge strikes. Better yet, there is no hangover in the morning. TALES OF ORDINARY MADNESS is a collection of short stories, united by themes of desperation, loneliness, dead-end jobs, sexual perversion, & a need for real connection in an alienated, disturbed world. In these stories there is truly something of the profane & sacred, irreverent & holy, indifferent & feeling. The stories stay with one long after the reading is over. Bukowski's writing style is as nonconforming as his person. He doesn't always adhere to the rules of syntax, but this only serves to visibly, or tangibly, underscore the more abstract originality of the stories & situations themselves. Bukowski isn't for everyone. The writing is fierce, sexuallly explicit, unforgiving, & yet so totallly true to the characters & their lives that it never seems overdone, affected, false. Through his words, Bukowski manages to transform the ordinary into something great.
rip-roaring madness - By: , 13 Feb 2000 The moment where our hero Hank meet's the zen master is a rich delicacy to be taken only on a belly full of hard drink good god this is one of the funniest chapters ever written by man or beast hats off to the german swine charles bukowski for making me roar & bawl like a beaten child .
Simple, but... - By: , 17 Apr 1999 I read the tales, & I just Love them, Easy & Deep at the same time. "Appunti sulla Peste" one of the best, "Violenza Carnale" I Also see the short movie, just probably True. I feel...one More Beer.
