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Ask the Dust
by John Fante, Charles Bukowski (Preface)
(June 1980)
"I was a young man, starving and drinking and trying to be a writer..."
Twelve years ago the Los Angeles Times asked America's most successful fiction writers to name their top-ten favorite works of 20th Century American fiction. John Fante's "Ask the Dust" was the only title to appear on every author's top-ten list in that article.
The story.
Fante's second book follows the adventures of his alterego, Arturo Bandini, as a struggling young writer in Los Angeles in the late 1930s. Bandini, the son of Italian immigrants, has left his home in Boulder, Colorado to pursue his dreams of writing in a shabby area of Los Angeles. When the novel begins, Bandini has had one story accepted for publication the "Little Dog Laughed" of which he is proud. Bandini's editor, Hackmuth, offers great encouragement. Bandini lives in a cheap hotel, the Alta Loma, in an area known as Bunker Hill. He struggles with writing, poverty, loneliness, Catholicism.
The book revolves around the relationship between Bandini and Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress who works at the Columbia Buffet. Lopez and Bandini are attracted to each other though their relationship explodes with hostility, because of the racial prejudices of Bandini towards Mexican-Americans and Camilla's prejudice against children of immigrants. Bandini meets and has a short affair with an older woman, Vera, who suffers from a terrible disfigurement; the affair inspires him to write his first novel based on Vera's life. Camilla is in love with Sammy, a bartender at the Columbia Buffet, who becomes terminally ill and rejects her. Camilla is addicted to drugs and suffers a severe emotional breakdown. The story has a tragic end as Camilla wanders into the desert alone with her dog and Bandini, hearbroken, becomes disillusioned with writing. The style. The style is essential, words are used sparingly, and here and there Fante adopts a lyrical tone. Everything is impressively created with a few brushes: the streets and smell of the city, the secondary characters, the disillusioned soul of Bandini. An intriguing comment on the power of the writing is in Bandini's own appreciation of his novel: "It won't shake the world, it won't kill a soul, it won't fire a gun, ah, but you'll remember it to the day you die, you'll lie there breathing your last, and you'll smile as you remember the book. The story of Very Rivken, a slice out of life." (p.146) |
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