Bukowski, Rhys, and Books That Had to Be Written

I risk repeating myself. I’ve written about this before, yet it’s become the lens that defines my reading. Some books are beautifully constructed, their scaffolding visible and admirable. Others couldn’t have been written any other way. They emerge from compulsion, from what I’ve come to think of as ontological necessity. These are the books that lodge deepest, that make it onto my Core list. And this year, two additions clarify the pattern: Charles Bukowski’s Post Office and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.

Bukowski wrote Post Office at 49, after quitting the postal service, living on a $100-a-month advance from Black Sparrow Press. He’d carried those decades (1952-1969) like an infection. The novel functions as delayed exorcism. The trauma festered before finally demanding release. The prose enacts this rather than describing it: urgent, unpolished bursts that feel vomited rather than composed. There’s no literary distance, no reflective cushion between Henry Chinaski and his degradation. He simply reports the hangovers, the exhaustion, the soul-death of sorting mail, the supervisors circling.

The novel obsesses over where those years lodged in his flesh: aching legs, swollen feet, the physical breakdown work inscribed on him. Writing becomes ritual expulsion, trying to purge the post office from his actual bones. Yet the exorcism remains incomplete. Chinaski at the novel’s end still drinks, still cycles through women, still carries the damage. He quits the job without escaping the patterns it carved into him. This incompleteness makes the compulsion more desperate. Bukowski had to write it knowing it wouldn’t fully free him. He needed readers to witness what happened so those years became real, even if never truly escaped.

Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea emerges from a different haunting. She had to write her way back into Jane Eyre‘s silenced woman, had to give Bertha Mason a voice because that absence haunted her across decades and oceans. The novel reads like urgent testimony rather than literary exercise. Rhys couldn’t write polished craft here. The material demanded she break open Charlotte Brontë’s gothic and speak from inside the madwoman’s burning.

Both books share that quality of possessed writing. These are books that could destroy their authors if left unwritten. This separates literature that impresses from literature that won’t let go.

Looking at my Core 120, the pattern becomes inescapable. Paul Celan after the Shoah. Imre Kertész’s Kaddish for an Unborn Child. Alejandra Pizarnik before suicide. Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet as compulsive accumulation. Robert Walser’s Microscripts. Hervé Guibert writing AIDS. Jon Fosse’s Septology. Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work. These are books their authors had to write or be destroyed by what remained unspoken. Even the fragments and notebooks on my list reveal this: Simone Weil’s Notebooks, Emily Dickinson’s self-preserved poems, Roberto Bazlen’s Notes Without a Text. These aren’t polished works. They’re compulsive recordings from writers who had to keep documenting or disappear.

I keep returning to this concept because it explains something essential about how certain books endure in memory. The issue isn’t technical brilliance or cultural importance. What matters is that ineffable quality where you feel the author’s survival depended on the writing. Books where the scaffolding isn’t visible because there was no scaffolding, only necessity.

This is what I’ve recognized this year: my Core list maps ontological necessity across literature. These are writers who had no choice, who were haunted into writing these specific works. And Post Office, with its desperate exorcism and incomplete purging, belongs absolutely among them.