Ask The Dust

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Great - Rated
The fact this was written in 1949 makes it even better as it feels so modern. The writing is simple and brilliant. Charles Bukowski said 'Fante was my God' and I can see why.

A masterpiece - Rated
This novel is a true, inspired masterpiece. The story is behind any word, describes the life of Arturo Bandini, "lover of men and beasts alike!"

There is not much to say, apart "Read it and enjoy"! An extraordinary novel about love, success, death, religion and life. The life of Bandini, one of the most extraodinary characters of the contemporary literature.

High passion and great prose - Rated
John Fante was all about hot-blooded passion, longing, about all the things a person needs but can't get and his characters reflect this and are the real interest of the novel. Highly Passionate, unpredictable and contradictory, his characters can occasionally feel a little like eccentric puppets behaving unpredictably for the sake of it, with no real psychological mechanism, like someone imitating Dostoevsky without really understanding it.

Fante can be a little annoying at times in terms of his obsession with writing, his arrogance and self-importance. Obviously he, as a writer manages to maintain some distance from the arrogant protagonist, but not much.

That said, this is still one of his best novels. Fante's weaknesses as a writer are at their least conspicuous here and his strengths are most apparent.

An excellent, fluid prose style and one of the best endings I've ever read.

A Worthwhile Read ... Brilliant Ending ... about the Humiliations of Love - Rated
This book lingered on my mind for weeks. So it must good. It's the story of Arturo Bandini, a young would-be writer who comes to Los Angeles to make it as a writer, but discovers poverty and loneliness instead. That is, until he encounters Camilla Lopez, a Mexican-American waitress.

What makes this romance interesting is, like all great love stories, it is doomed.

In fact, there is quite of bit of friction and nastiness right from the beginning between these so-called lovers. And ultimately it is one-sided, with Arturo sadly learning a grand lesson in humility. (We've all been there.) We see the character arc from self-absorbed ego-driven writer (with delusions of grandeur) to self-sacrificing and responsible human being. This is a tragic tale, with Camilla's decline and Arturo's helplessness underscored. The ending is brilliant. I literally fell into a stunned silence at the end.

My only small complaint is that John Fante doesn't to know much about the main narcotic alluded to in the book: Marijuana. It's almost comical how little he knows about it ("Reefer Madness" might be his main reference and source of information); yet this aside, ASK THE DUST remains a powerful book, a haunting one. One I would recommend, especially to writers.

The Informed - Rated
I read Ask the Dust for the first time this week, but when I think on it, Fante first came to my attention when I saw the first paragraph of this novel used as the epigraph to Bret Easton Ellis's 1994 collection of stories, The Informers.

"One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the very middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed."

Probably Ellis intended to use this to infuse his collection with the essence of Fante, as his characters were modern versions of Fante's: feckless, drifting, irresponsible. There the similarities end though, for Ellis's characters derive their plotlessness from an excess of money and unregarded privilege, whereas Fante's have the opposite. Also, Ellis's characters are suffering - to cite the blurb - from the death of the soul, whereas Fante's are bursting with heart and soul from the first page.

Ask the Dust was published in 1939 but it feels entirely fresh. Like his disciple Bukowski (by an embarrassing coincidence, I read what I thought was the opening of Ask the Dust in the bookshop and liked it enough to buy it, only to get home and realise what I had liked so much was the start of the introduction, penned by Charles Bukowski), Fante uses mostly ordinary, unordained language to extraordinarily vivid effect. This makes the occasional fine phrase - 'the waves eating the shore' - all the more arresting. We live right alongside Fante's alter ego Arturo Bandini as he struggles with his writing, his love Camilla, and his own zigzagging sense of self-worth. For comparisons to Bukowski (or vice versa, as Fante was writing thirty years earlier), Bandini is not actually as low and hopeless as Bukowski's Henry Chinaski. He has a fair measure of success with his writing, and his mostly one-way love affair with his 'publisher' J.C. Hackmuth is frequently hilarious.

Nonetheless the essence of the Depression and life lived on a day-to-day basis pervades the book and infuses it with a powerful sense of sadness. As I understand it, Ask the Dust is part of a quartet of novels featuring Arturo Bandini and I'll surely be picking those up soon, along with his other novels in print in the UK, Brotherhood of the Grape and 1933 Was a Bad Year.