Book Review: "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" by Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski is one of those writers who is growing on me, but this one was a struggle at first. The stories are strange, the writing feels off-putting at times and well, there were moments where I just wanted to give up on the thing. So what did I do? I set the book down and started again a week later, eager to see what I was missing out on. My mental health is not in the best of places even as I write this in May, 2026. I hope that by the time this review is released, it has improved some - I continue to stay hopeful. Reading Bukowski is probably not going to help though, in fact it might make things worse. Here we go...

The stories mean less individually than they do as a group. They have continuous themes and that means that you probably want to pay attention to them as a whole rather than on their own. I can tell that the publications in Open City (a newspaper filled with these clippings) might have struck folks as odd because once I finished reading the book, I sat and did some note-taking. I was drawing lines between themes and characters, ideas and motifs going throughout the piece and that's when I realised that this is like a strange and twisted autobiography. The individual pieces make little sense on their own, but read as a whole, they provide more complete imagery. I can't think that on their own, these stories would have worked at all. It would've just confused the reader and probably put them off.

The Dirty Old Man in question is definitely Bukowski, there's no question about that - but the persona that he paints of himself is one that is self-admittedly abusive. This is where I got a bit confused. Why paint yourself in such a light which basically shows the reader that you're a terrible human being? The reader is not going to be able to trust you and put their faith in you. The more I thought about it though, the more I realised that was the point. Bukowski's work isn't about putting your faith in him, it is him holding you a mirror and asking you "can you really put faith in yourself or are you hiding the fact that you too, are quite a bad person?" It is almost as though he is just truthful enough to admit it. He seems like the anti-Kerouac but here we are, reading his work in which this abusive behaviour seems central to understanding his identity. It is both off-putting and brilliant.

There's a deep seated loneliness hidden within this book. A man who uses alcohol as his best friend and yet, it gives him the worst things in the world. I think I heard my doctor say it once: drinking alcohol to cope with your feelings is the same as setting your house on fire from the inside and expecting it to keep you warm. The bleak and yet, horrifying aspects of life are recounted and recounted with the help of drinking, lying at the centre of every single piece in the book. Even if it is only mentioned fleetingly - it is still there like a heartbeat in the background. It is flailing and incomplete and yet, we cannot look away. It is a morbid reality in which we too, are trapped. But we lie to ourselves. He does not.

It's the horror that comes with knowing who one really is.

It is framed with the usual Bukowski railings against the values of the middle class and yet, it feels strangely apart from itself. I have to admit, I didn't enjoy this as much as his poetry. His poetry feels more understandable and this seems more like ramblings. His poetry feels more worked-on and his prose is a bit difficult. But when it comes to the way he writes, I think it definitely takes more than one read to get where he's coming from.

I hope you also try this out. It wasn't my favourite but I did understand it after a while. I hope things get better for me but for now, I'm stuck with Bukowski.