This is about as bad as Journey to the End of the Night was good. I knew of Charles Bukowski's admiration for Celine, but I recently came across another Bukowski quote that it was only for "Journey"--not for anything else. Well, I haven't read anything else, but I have now read this book, his other most famous work, and what a disappointment! Whereas Journey goes from one outrageous thing to the next and moves all over the place, this book, after a somewhat promising beginning, settles down to the interminable story of the protagonist's (Ferdinand's) involvement with an inventor/writer, whose crazy money-making schemes lead to one disaster after another. I'm sure this is all supposed to be funny, but it isn't very. The book manages to pick up a bit toward the end with a series of disasters, followed by an ambiguous ending. I'm left with the feeling that I need to rid the house of this book as soon as I can--before it affects anything on the shelf close to it. BookCrossing, here it comes.

released with 1 other book