Ask the Dust

Fante was writing in a different literary world. While Charles Bukowski's introduction expresses his own fascination with Fante's exposition of Depression Los Angeles, the novelist fails to present anything but stick-figure characters. (It's clear why Fante was more successful at screenplays than novels: he writes scenes.) I'd always wanted to read Fante. Okay, I've done it. I don't have to read another.

Some amazingly beautiful prose in this one. Some of his lines are sheer poetry. And the story's good too. A young man in love with a girl who loves another man who doesn't love her...Great stuff, I laffed throughout the whole book.

This book describes the dispare and triumph felt during the creative process better than anything else I've read. Also, it's pretty funny and transports you back in time to 1930s LA. It's a quick, entertaining read.

While John Fante is a lyrical, poetic, captivating writer, the characters in "Ask The Dust" had little affect on me.
I had trouble sympathizing for Arturo Bandini on any level, as he was an arrogant coward until about the last page.
Overall, this novel was an interesting one that can be interpreted in a variety of ways.

I guess there is something to be said for sticking with a book without much of a plot and whose characters are dislikable. I read the whole thing, but it would be saying too much to say that I enjoyed it.

Fante is vastly overrated, which considering he's as unknown and unheralded as he is, should intrigue the curious. The characters are not even consistent, changing from how Fante describes their convictions 100 pages earlier, without explanation, in ways that do not hinge on the action. Le Morte d'Artur, 1485, is more consistent, and Mallory didn't know what he was doing. His somewhat vaunted powers of description are actually weak. For someone who went thru the Long Beach earthquake he describes, it reads like a summary out a newspaper account (not well-written with any insight). His literary habits follow the vogue of the time, of wistful endings. The only saving grace of the book is the descriptions of LA in the early 1930s, the roads, the sand blowing in on Santa Ana winds when LA was not surrounded by the suburbs that now block that sand. He likes to relate a negative view of the romance other writers describe, for the non-economic depression Fante felt, which is as superficially subjective as the other pov.

Undoubtedly, John Fante is a great writer. But unfortunately, Ask the dust is not a great book. It can became quite boreign, and as a reader, you feel that so many details tend to no purpose whatsoever. Fante has a fantastic sense of humour, but somehow, it's not enough.

Following the numerous recommendations for this book, I finally started it, and over the course of a few days, feverishly finished it, stumbling to the sudden end with a jolt and thirst for more. This is a story of such emotional edge and psychology breadth that it will hover over my thoughts and dreams for weeks to come.

A noirish story set in Depression era Los Angeles, it has the rapid, desperate pacing of James M. Cain, and the same faulted characters who grapple with the bittersweet torment of obsessive love in all its miserable splendor amidst themes of the American Dream, Catholicism, and racism in the rapidly expanding melting pot that was Southern California during that era . Author John Fante sees this piece as being similar to Of Human Bondage, and like Maugham’s classic, there is an autobiographical component which lends it even more visceral grit.

Fante's comparison is accurate, but his style bears little resemblance to Maugham, one of my favorite authors. Instead, it is an addictive and compelling prose that goes down hard and bracing like cheap whiskey instead of smooth and delicate as Maugham can be. That's fine with me. This is the type of story that is proudly American, albeit not in some canned jingoistic fashion, but rather in one that embraces the dirty, ugly, and hungry place of broken dreams and broken people. It is, quite simply, an American fiction classic.

Normally I dig a book in reading pleasure from the beginning when some one recommended, but if it does not do it for me, I leave until later when I maybe ready. That is the situation with Ask the Dust! But thanks for asking!

Vivid, crazy characters in a novel focused on the iconic "struggling writer", and set in downtown Los Angeles during the Great Depression. A world where broken, batty, barely bathed, even diseased, bums still have varieties of women throwing themselves at them. They manage to survive when others cannot. There is so much hunger and desperation.
The young aspiring writer bounces between episodes of Bare survival, Self-contempt, Self-flagellation, Self-delusion, until he eventually gets his sea legs. His art and a basic goodness save him.
Of course by today's standards the characters are fatally mysogynistic and racist. And this was before even Italians and Jews became unhyphenated, or 'white'. So his character is limited; he cannot "see".
The USA was a grieving culture, alienated as usual because of it's desperate need for exclusions and automated hatreds. I guess the word "genius" comes to folks' minds because John Fante's character's journey is neither gratuitous nor self-conscious, or pretentious, nor unmindful or even self-pitying. I was relieved when the book ended.

"Ask the Dust" is an autobiographical novel. It is also a love story between two people Arturo and Camilla who can never be together. As an autobiography, the character Arturo is in Long Beach for the great earthquake of 1934. The area is devastated and Arturo is in a difficult situation as he tries to survive among the chaos. Upon his return to Los Angeles however, he creates multiple histories of his experiences in the earthquake for the people he interacts with. he creates multiple realities in which he is greater than he was. he trades on the earthquake for free drinks and adulation. This is an ironic self-referential portion of the novel which calls out the nature of autobiography. This is a novel which is true to life but may not be true to history.

This is an autobiographical novel with the Italian-American Fante revisiting his struggling-writer protagonist Arturo Bandini. The prose is incredible; the first paragraph sucked me right in. As Bandini works to get his first book published, he falls in love with a borderline-insane Mexican waitress, Camilla Lopez, who loves another man who despises and mistreats her. I won't give away the plot but I'll say that I found Camilla haunting in a way unlike no other character in any novel I've ever read. I read the book in two days, but even when I put it down to do something else, I couldn't stop wondering what Camilla would do next. Quite simply, one of the best seven or eight books I've ever read.

Review can be found at [...] or below:

On John Fante's official website, it says,

Born in Denver, Colorado, Fante's early years were spent in relative poverty. The son of an Italian father, Nicola Fante, and an Italian-American mother, Mary Capolungo, Fante was educated in various Catholic schools in Boulder, Colorado and briefly attended the University of Colorado.

In 1929, he dropped out of college and moved to Southern California to concentrate on his writing. He lived and worked in Wilmington, Long Beach, Manhattan Beach, the Bunker Hill district of downtown Los Angeles, California, various residences in Hollywood and Echo Park, and Malibu. In 1955 Fante developed diabetes, which eventually blinded him and two years later he would have his legs amputated. He continued to write despite this though, by dictating the stories to his wife.

Such is the interesting background of John Fante (1909-1983), novelist and Hollywood screenwriter.

Ask the Dust is one of four novels referred to as "The Saga of Arturo Bandini." In this one, Arturo is a youthful struggling "Eyetalian" writer living in a cheap Los Angeles hotel who falls in love with Camilla, a waitress of Mexican descent. She discourages him, mocks him, and generally makes his life miserable In his frustration, he vacillates between love and expressions of hate while she really loves Sammy, a man dying of tuberculosis. She's quite unstable, becomes a pothead, ends up in a mental institution, but then gets out and finds Arturo. He has just published his great novel and is now on his way to wealth. Is a happy ending coming? Read it and see. It's good. They also made a movie of it with Salma Hayek and Colin Ferrell. (I haven't seen it, but it got mediocre ratings.)

This book is poetic; and one reviewer compared Arturo to Salinger's character Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, published six years after Ask the Dusk. And I loved some of Arturo's rants, which often resulted in a complete change of mind. Note the short punchy sentences and his choice of words in this example on page 22:

Here was the Church of our lady, very old, the adobe blackened with age. For sentimental reasons, I will go inside. For sentimental reasons only. I have not read Lenin, but I have heard him quoted, religion is the opium of the people. Talking to myself on the the church steps: yeah, the opium of the people. Myself, I am an atheist: I have read The Anti-Christ and I regard it as a capital piece of work. I believe in the transvaluation of values, Sir. The Church must go, it is a haven of the booboisie, of boobs and bounders and all brummagem mountebanks.

Arturo, on his knees inside the church, then bargains with God--a prayer, for sentimental reasons: "...Make a great writer of me and I will return to the Church." And shortly thereafter, he mentally constructs an interview with a reporter prior to his departure to Sweden for his Nobel Award. Youthful delusions and contradictory feelings abound.

A passage of particularly elegant prose, this time with longer sentences. It's a commentary on Southern California in the '30s:

I went up to my room, up the dusty stairs of Bunker Hill, past the soot-covered frame buildings along the dark street, sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet. Dust and old buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street. The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from boston, and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep the illusion that this was paradise, that their little paper-mâché homes were castles. The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged.

In the introduction author Charles Bukowski called Fante his "god" with a lifetime of influence on his writing--for his "distinct way of writing." In the little I've read of Bukowski, I'd say he tried to honor Fante by copying his style, but so far in my recent explorations, Fante holds the higher acclaim. This was the first Fante book I've read. I'll read more of him.

I devour books, always looking for the jolt in the pit of the stomach a great writer can deliver. The titles of most books will be lost on me a week after putting them down. Ask the Dust delivers, alright. A few minutes ago I turned the last page of John Fante's Ask the Dust. I still feel it buzzing in my head like cheap whiskey. I'll be picking it up again...later, when I can stop thinking about Camilla Lopez's almond eyes and brown skin.

The book's protagonist, Arturo Bandini, swings like a pendulum between outrageous, black-hearted evil and pure, righteous goodness. He is a character whose average state is smack in the middle of the human spectrum of moral existence. He represents all who have been poor young men living life at its fullest and most sordid while pursuing a goal. Many people vacillate from day to day between thoughts of meanness and lust and the drive to do something to benefit others. Bandini lives out each extreme state of mind he experiences by acting on it, often to his immediate regret. He hurts the one he loves, and he can't help it.

Ah, Camilla Lopez. She is lost in the world and wants what she cannot have more than survival. She is the woman every young man wants to protect and possess, and she can make a man do anything she wants--do it and be humiliated, and hate her, and come back for more knowing he is being used.

Every man over eighteen should read Ask the Dust as a cautionary tale. Every man over 40 should read it to feel the visceral ache of remembering that certain girl who for a smile or touch on the arm made him her slave.
This novel is not for the emotionally delicate. It is written in the style of the late `30s, almost noir in its delivery. It's a tour of poverty, despair, frustrated love, and black tragedy. There's also a bit of gallows humor tossed in for good measure. If you're a writer, the novel is mandatory reading. For open-minded readers, it's a literary earthquake. Expect aftershocks.

In "Ask the Dust" John Fante renders a pre-freeway Los Angeles; a Los Angeles that is organically connected to the surrounding environs, constantly reminded by the ever-present dust that it is a desert city.

That desert city was focused on downtown with its train tracks and depots, trolley system and urban grid known today as the "historic core." His alter-ego and anti-hero Arturo Bandini rides the Angel's Flight railway not as a tourist, but as someone who must get down the Bunker Hill to Broadway for a drink and a pack of cigarettes.

It is a Los Angeles not yet divorced from its western reality, not yet a left coast New York, primed, but not entirely enveloped by the entertainment business. In fact, in a letter to his cousin Jo Campiglia, he describes the book as having "no Hollywood stuff."

Fante's is centered around the same Bunker Hill; a residential redoubt of ramshackle hotels, fading Victorian mansions, and wood-slatted apartment buildings.

And who resides in the redoubt? Well, the familiar characters of today and yore. But let us bow to Bandini, a struggling writer paying rent by the week for a hotel room, on the cusp of a great literary success:

"Dust and old buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street. The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots of their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun...The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged."

Time has been kind to "Ask the Dust" in the way it is kind to a lot of literature because the world it portrays is gone or much changed. So what was in 1939 an oddly paced, edgy and offbeat drama of insignificants taking place in a world familiar to many, is now the same drama in a disappeared world, which adds appeal.

And what of that drama? Fante writes Campiglia that it is the, "Story of a girl I once loved who loved someone else, who in turn despised her."

Fante was a successful screenwriter in Hollywood with credits such as "Full of Life," "Walk on the Wildside," and "My Six Loves," among others, to his credit. So his ability to synopsize a story quite so well is understandable given the demands of "industrial" writing.

With equal efficiency does he go on to explain, "Strange story of a Mexican girl who somehow doesn't fit into modern life, took to marijuana, lost her mind and wandered into the Mojave desert with a little Pekingese dog."

And there you have it, in Fante's words, which preclude the highway scribe from going into more plot details.

Aside from the portrait of Depression-era Los Angeles, a rather poor-fitting excerpt on an earthquake experienced by the author in Long Beach, and more of the above-quoted visions of a downtown now overrun with antiseptic corporate towers, "Ask the Dust," is the portrait of a woman:

"Except for the contour of her face and the brilliance of her teeth, she was not beautiful. But at that moment she turned to smile at one of her old customers, and I saw a streak of white under her lips. Her nose was Mayan, flat, with large nostrils. Her lips were heavily rouged, with the thickness of a negress' lips. She was a racial type, and as such she was beautiful, but she was too strange for me. Her eyes were at a high slant, her skin was dark but not black, and as she walked her breasts moved in a way that showed their firmness."

But something about this girl, Camilla Lopez, works for him, perhaps it is this...

"The girl moved like a dancer, her strong silk legs gathering bits of sawdust as her tattered shoes glided over the marble floor."

Bandini, a guy who is serious about his literature, if a bit roughly-hewn in the personality department, latches onto the girl's class and lower life station when her natural aristocracy provokes his second generation Dago insecurities.

"Those shoes, they were huaraches, the leather thongs wrapped several times around her ankles. They were desperately ragged huaraches; the woven leather had become unraveled."

Camilla works downtown at the Columbia Buffet where she and Bandini open the door to a relationship better left closed. He's taken in a strange way by her; she disdains. He gains her interest through the application of lesser arts. "I hate you," she tells him in turn. By the end of their psychological skirmish she blows him a kiss goodbye.

Do people really behave in this way?

Worse.

She follows him out, girlish, flirty, surrendering. Rather than relish his conquest, Bandini digs for a deeper cut.

""Those huaraches - do you have to wear them, Camilla? Do you have to emphasize the fact that you always were and always will be a filthy little greaser?"

Nice guy, Arturo Bandini.

"She looked at me in horror, her lips open. Clasping both hands against her mouth, she rushed inside the saloon. I heard her moaning, 'Oh, oh, oh'."

In between this first meeting and the next, Bandini has a second short story published "back East." Yes, in spite of his cruelty, we're rooting for this first-person narrator much as we do an escaped convict hunted by hounds. He takes his subsequent winnings down to the Columbia Buffet where Camilla is wearing, "New white pumps, with high heels."

She's not impressed by his newfound wealth, in fact, prefers him the other way. It was for Bandini she'd shed the huaraches, but in doing so, loses him again.

"The new shoes were hurting Camilla's feet. She didn't have her old style. She winced as she walked and gritted her teeth."

They go back and forth anew. There's an unhealthiness that pervades their relationship rooted largely in the fact she is inexplicably in love with a rundown, dying in fact, bartender at the buffet.

"Ask the Dust," really, has two anti-heroes, or at least one anti-hero and one anti-heroine in the bewitching, irascible Camilla.

On a first "date" (for lack of a more appropriate word) she takes Bandini out to the beach at Santa Monica in her 1929 Ford. The dish he portrays reads delicious...

"After a mile she complained about her feet and asked me to hold the wheel. As I did it she reached down and took off her shoes. Then she took the wheel again and threw one foot over the side of the Ford. At once her dress ballooned out, spanked her face. She tucked it under herself, but even so her brown thighs were exposed even to a pinkish underthing. It drew a lot of attention. Motorists shot by, pulled up short, and heads came out of windows to observe her brown naked leg. It made her angry. She took to shouting at the spectators, yelling that they ought to mind their own business. I sat at her side, slouched down, trying to enjoy a cigaret [that's Fante's spelling for the smoke:] that burned too hotly in the rush of the wind."

Fante went on to enjoy success in his own time, to own a ranch in Southern California, and then to become the tragic in his own life's play, stricken by diabetes that left him blind while relatively young.

One hopes his darkness was in some way brightened by the vision of his Mexican girl.

Ah, Camilla. You are the reason for the book, the muse around which a story, your story, asked to be spun. With many shortcomings, its autobiographical bent the greatest, you rescue "Ask the Dust," ask that it be read, ask us to ask, "What dust did you become?" And beg us to touch it with our lips.

Went into this book with high expectations based on the reviews here and on Goodreads, and oh boy was I disappointed. Every character in this book is extraordinarily unlikable. That certainly doesn't disqualify a book for me, but the writing style and the story were nowhere near enough to redeem it for me. The character's motivations don't mirror those of any human beings I've ever met in the real world, the writing is repetitive, and the whole "reefer madness" subplot was laughable.

Bukowski was right that he had found True Magic in Fante's 'Ask The Dust'. For, a novel who's pages are carved in quivering Meat is a miracle to a starving young writer. It was the same revelation for me as it has been a Godsend for others, as it shall no doubt be 'Alchemical Gold in Prose' for many more to come.
One dusty Summer on Alcazar NorthEast, in the 'Land of Entrapment' me & a small group of friends all in turn read John Fante's 'Ask The Dust' upon each other's admonishment that it could very well be the greatest 20th century American novel ever written from the perspective of a poor white boy trying to make it as a Writer and a Lover in the Big City; in particular, The City of Angels, but most any SouthWestern Desert City with a predominantly Latino culture is described with a sensational genius. That is, one can smell the dry air wafting over the Mountains, feel the sun in the hot sand between one's toes, taste the green Chile pepper numbness, hear the shouts and whistles of the busy avenues, and see a million beautiful dark-haired women strutting down some Central ave with something like a nostalgic ... stirring the expectant butterflies deep down in the Gut...
Never had I come across in tough literary American youth a Book as Honest as Fante's own. A Roman Catholic Italian child from a poor Colorado home who went in search of Angels in the city designated as their own. 'Ask The Dust' is part two of that Bandini Saga, 'The Road To Los Angeles' being the first...
A German Shepard, a young handsome fellow of new Mexican extract made himself a welcome member of our castle and we Christened him 'Bandini', after Fante's autobiographical Hero; we named the Pup we took in of Bandini's fathering, the largest of the litter: 'Arturo', in tribute to the Saga of Arturo Bandini, who shall forever live for us somewhere in the vicinity of that street, in that magical summer that is the greatest season of a young man's life.
Every young American male should know of this book, for the world would be a much more sincere & honest place were it so. Fante's courage is a beacon in the hurricane, read as if in the eye of that storm that is a young man's insatiable passion. My God, what can one say? the Title 'Ask the Dust' already says it all.

Rating 3.75

Arturo Bandini is a struggling writer in LA in the 30's. He has one short story that makes him a little cash but is struggling for ideas. He falls for a girl at a local bar. They have a very volatile relationship. There on again off again relationship last the whole story. On one of their off again times some drunk woman stumbles into his hotel room. Arturo is a gentleman about it and actually listens to all the craziness she talks.

Fante strings together characters and emotions of the rougher side of town. You feel the depression and overall despair of the people in the hotel.

Arturo Bandini comes to sunny Los Angeles to write the great American novel. Only problem is he doesn't feel very American. And Los Angeles is full of fogs, bad coffee, and displaced Midwesterners who butcher calves in fleabag hotels. Bandini, the narrator of Fante's thinly veiled autobiography, has only his talent and he's not shy about announcing it. For anyone who cares, anyone who will listen, he's right up there with the great ones. Step aside Faulkner and Steinbeck, Bandini has arrived. At his core, though, the little man of literature is a self-loathing slug. He loves himself, he hates himself. When he chances upon a Mexican beauty working in some cheap cafe, he finds the perfect target for all his bile. A trainwreck romance ensues. Bandini bangs out prose with unbelievable ease, but he can't defend himself against a torrent of petty degredations: the palm trees covered in dust, his own failure as an Italian in the Casanova mold. And his Aztec queen, the tormented Camilla, just can't get it together. The desert calls. Fante's novel is all about displacement, that gnawing feeling of not belonging to anyplace or anyone.

While screening an art film under consideration for a local film festival, there was a reference in the screenplay to John Fante's "Ask the Dust": "The greatest book ever written," according to the protagonist. Uninformed, I searched for the book title at my local library, thinking the greatest book ever written would certainly be there, after all this is a major library system in a major city. To my surprise, it wasn't included among the John Fante titles.

So, I "Googled" and found the book in paperback on the store.com.

After reading the first page I was hooked. Written by John Fante in 1938, Arturo Bandini, the fictional narrator of this book changes from first person to the third person effortlessly. Cynical, confused, egomaniacal, seemingly asexual (or was he "queer" as Camilla Lopez, his Mayan Princess, concludes after several attempts to arouse him - maybe that was as close to portraying a gay man as was permissible at the time), sadomasochistic, down right mean, believable and often endearing, "Ask the Dust" leaves you wishing there was more - but in awe of Fante for knowing when to conclude a great work!

Set in 1930's Los Angeles, as I read this book I found myself envisioning a black and white film running vividly through my mind. It is as though I WAS Arturo Bandini and I was seeing that dusty, hot, hungry time through his eyes. As crazed as he is, surprisingly I empathized with his warped view of the world, and by seeing the world through this lens, I will never again see anything in quite the same way. His ghost will whisper in my ear for years to come. Can a work of fiction possibly offer more than that?

This is a jewel! I have found a new favorite fiction author, John Fante! Sad he died in 1983; happy to hear there is a renewed interest in his work and that he was a prolific writer!

Ask the Dust didn't revolutionize writing. It didn't create a new genre. There are others like Hamsun, Bukowski and many more that have written in this genre or style, but for me Ask the Dust stands taller than all the rest.

This book is such an emotional roller coaster that from one minute to the next you will alternate being choked up and depressed, to laughing out loud, to reveling in the hero's triumph and then right back to choked up and sad ready to start the ride all over again.

I enjoy this genre immensely, but Fante's Ask the Dust is the only one that I find myself continually pulling out of my book case to peruse the pages for nth time. Just seeing the book conjures up those emotions I remember from my first reading. The only bad part about reading this book was the knowledge that I would never be able to read it again for the first time. That was my only disappointment with this book.

Ask the Dust is just a really good book. I have recommended it to all my friends and loaned it out numerous times (thankfully it has always found its way back to me, so far) and have found that it gets generally very good reviews from those that I know. Now I'm recommending it to you.

John Fante's most famous novel, "Ask the Dust", is an act of bravura for a writer, since it deals with this profession's struggles until he/she becomes a successful author. This writer is not afraid of depicting for his reader that there is no glamour for someone who wants to write and has to make ends meet at the same time.

His main character is Arturo Bandini, a young writer that in the 30s abandons his family and hometown and move to Los Angeles after his dream. Having published only a short story in a magazine, this man keeps looking for inspiration and trying to get money to pay rent, eat and so forth. He meets a beautiful Mexican waitress called Camilla, and eventually falls in love with her. But the problem is that she is in love with someone else-- but, at the same time, fancies going out with Bandini.

Eventually his life will find joy and sadness. Bandini has more of his work published, and makes more money. On the other hand, Camilla reveals to be a sick person and has a nervous breakdown. Apparently the main character can't have both things, love and success, at the same time. He won't give up his love, and he will do whatever it takes to help Camilla and have her love.

Fante's style is very direct with only a few flashbacks popping up from time to time. His characters are vivid and believable, and his writing is beautiful. Harper Perennial's P.S. edition of "Ask the Dust" is highly recommended since it has many especial features at the back of the book, such as writer's biography, letters and excepts from his novels.

WOW! What can be said of this wonderful book, this subtle style of expression that punches you in your gut yet leaves you wondering how it got past your defenses? This book is really meant for the intelligent reader: you've seen all the literary tricks that aim at masterful expression. Now suddenly, just when you learned to anticipate every style and reading has become boring, Fante steps in and delivers a whirlwind of literary blows to your head!
This is the serious alternative to Fante's sadly funny Dreams From Bunker Hill. Here we explore the mind of a stuggling writier as he tries to destroy and yet love his beautiful yet cluelless Camilla. Is Camilla the public? Her love Sammy, the bad writier stricken with TB, is he the sorry trash the public usually falls for? Is Vera Fante's muse? Is his steak-hungry neighbor the publishers that use up artists? Who knows, but if you want literary beauty depicting genuine humanity READ THIS BOOK! The closing scene is easily the most beautiful I have ever read, and haunts me like the flickering of a small candle...

In ASK THE DUST, Los Angeles in the late Depression years is not glamorous. The city is always at the mercy of the heat and dust of the desert that grabs its skirts. The people who actually embody the success everyone dreams of are will-o-wisps at the edge of one scene. The denizens have come to town from elsewhere in search of fortune and fame. It is a "have not" world of strangers at the mercy of grim residential hotel landladies. From the intersection of Bunker Hill and Hill Street, Fante's protagonist Arturo Bandini lets go a cri de coeur that scorches the pages of the book.

Arturo's dream is to find fortune as a writer; he's going to show everyone back home in Colorado. He's going to show everyone, period. He's on his way, having successfully published a short story that he waves under everyone's nose. His passion and anger form a positive charge that is locked in an embrace with the equally weighty force of Camilla Lopez, a Mexican barmaid whose life is spiraling downward. To say more is to spoil the characters' suspenseful tango. Fante lays out their story in the pulsing beat of Arturo's voice. He makes high use of symbolism. Every word is honest, every sentence beautifully crafted. He muscles challenging themes. The title says to ask questions, and by the end you know which ones to ask as you stand with Arturo looking out at the vast desert.

I understand that this is one in a quartet of novels featuring Arturo Bandini. This volume is highly self-possessed and does not rely on the existence of the others to be understood or appreciated, but I'm sufficiently intrigued to want to read them all.

Ask the Dust stars the fictional Arturo Bandini, an Italian-American from Colorado and alter ego of his creator John Fante. The story takes place in Los Angeles during the 1930s and chronicles Bandini's experiences as a fledgling writer. Much of the book describes his stormy love-hate relationship with waitress Camilla Lopez.

The writing is gritty and uninhibited. Sometimes it's painful to read. Fante pulls few punches as he reveals the inner thoughts of Bandini and, by extension, his own. A courageous literary work, not for the faint of heart.

This short novel is excellent. It's greater than most "major" works of other's modern writers. It is funny, it is painful, it is deep and shallow at the same time... and the flow of the writing. It's just plain great. I can't think of other writer doing what Fante achieved with "ask the dust", one of the most miserable love stories ever written.

But there's more. Chapter 12. The prose that begins with "but there was a tinge of darkness in the back of my mind" is one of the most intense things ever written. It's filled with sorrow, pain, guilt, the need for forgiveness, religion and what are you really driven by. Not ideas but "my blood". That chapter is great, the work a genius at the same level of Dostoevsky about knowledge of human nature. That chapter makes Fante one of the greatest writers ever.

The flow and combination of religion, philosophy, sensibility, reason, irracionality... everything.

This is one of the greatest book ever written in the USA.

Read it.

As other reviewers have said, if you are a Bukowski fan, you have to read this book. After going through a series of books that were so dull I felt like I had anvils on my eyelids, I decided to break my no-buy and get this book. Life is too short to force yourself through a tedious story. ANYHOO...This is one of those books that you do not want to put down but you do anyway because you don't want the story to end. I won't go into the specifics because there are probably dozens of reviews that will break the whole story down piece by piece. It's engaging, honest, funny and heartbreaking. It has jump-started my OCD and I now I must own all of Fante's books, and I've since then donated all the snoozefests to the library.

The first 13 chapters or so are absolutely fantastic, super-poetic, naturalistic writing; as good as most of Hemingway (king of the overrated writers) and post-Death-on-the-Installment-Plan Celine. The deep hatred that's the flipside of love is here in its most brutally tragic and truthful form in the scenes between Camilla and Bandini. Some people don't respond to these scenes because they've never bothered to examine these feelings in themselves (though they've definitely had them), they've just ignored and repressed them. Not Fante. No way! Fante's out to force readers to face these feelings in themselves, and it's so annoying, it hurts! But that's what good naturalistic writing is supposed to do: HURT. If you can't deal with it go read some moralistic, 'sympathetic,' nonsense; there are thousands of books of that type to choose from.
It should be obvious after reading the first chapter why Bukowski liked this book so much. Without Fante there would definitely never have been a Bukowski (whose stuff is distinctly original in subject matter, but much more commonplace in its writing style than this particular book by Fante anyway).
The smell and feel of Los Angeles in the '30s is damn near palpable. Things come alive in concise, economically crafted sentences, on an an almost "Day of the Locust" level.
Starting with the earthquake chapter things run out of steam for a while before picking up again towards the end.
For a simple 'little' book written in 1939 to still continue to affect readers in 2000 is no mean feat. "Ask the Dust" is like a cross between Nathaniel West, William Saroyan, and, yes, good old Bukowski (without the scatology, of course). And though I wouldn't put it on the same level as Hemingway's "Green Hills of Africa," or Celine's "Journey to the End of the Night," it's definitely one for the 'ages' (whatever the hell that means).

John Fante has remained obscure despite the best efforts of
a number of formidable academics and writers (Charles Bukowski not the least among them). Why? It could be the
naked honesty displayed in works such as Ask the Dusk,
Wait Until Spring Bandini, and The Brotherhood of the Grape.
Fante doesn't lie, even for his own benefit, and that doesn't set well Those Who Matter (mostly liars all). Ask
the Dust is Fante expelling the energy, love, frustration
and unbalanced joy of his youth. It's a beautiful and
sometimes startling piece of work.

Read this book in one evening, just truly wonderful, raw, real life, sad and tragic, just the way I like my books. This is definitely a book I will pick up again and read again soon. The relationship between Auturo and Camillia is just so sad, tragic yet humorous and feisty. This book is a great example of how most people's love lives work out in the real world, about how you can really truly love someone with all your heart, but that person does not love you back and may even use you to get things they want, while someone else falls in love with you, but you can't love that person back, because you are still in love with that other person who has no feelings for you. Beautiful and tragic. Loved it.

Narrators with a touch of bipolarity give this reader trouble. On one page, they are superior, dismissive, and smug; on the next, they are hysterically dependent, remorseful, and wretched. As a reading experience, such narrators seem like artificial constructs where the voices are inconsistent and never quite come together. For this reason, I had trouble with A FAN'S NOTES, HUNGER, and ASK THE DUST. These books give the feeling the author never quite mastered the material.

In AtD, this bipolarity undermines the engine that powers the book--the strange romantic relationship that Fante establishes between Arturo and Camilla. Here, Arturo, the narrator, is infatuated with Camilla. He yearns for her when he is alone. But in her presence, he is cruel and condescending. Basically, this dynamic--he's in love; he's a monster--moves the story forward. But this dynamic constantly raises a question: Why doesn't Camilla just drop this obnoxious oaf? What I'm saying is that, on the level of character, this odd romance is improbable, as well as annoying.

The ambivalence in this relationship, however, does make better sense on an abstract level. Here, Arturo is a young writer who comes to LA with dreams of literary success. In this striver's adventure, Fante makes Camilla represent LA and Southern California, both in her beauty and her indominability. When viewed this way, Arturo's battling infatuation with Camilla makes sense, since he is accommodating himself to, well, life in California--something that's beautiful but difficult and that he wants to conquer. Still, this is an element in the book--to be puzzled out by a conscientious reader--that lacks emotional impact.

Maybe it's a SPOILER. But I recklessly disclose that the ambitious Arturo does have some success late in AtD. But once this happens, the push and pull of story disappears and Fante has to force an ending. Regrettably, this is melodramatic with the young Fante apparently writing about something--hopheads--that is beyond his experiece. Here, clueless is an apt word.

Final Note: In my edition, Charles Bukowski wrote the introduction and it's terrific.

The copy I have has the Bukowski intro and anyone can see why Bukowski loves this book. It is so fresh, so well written, it could have been written today, except we don't have writers this good today (IMHO).

I heard of the book when I heard an interview with the author's son (whose book sounds good too and his son has led a Bukowski-like life). He said his Dad stopped writing novels when he became a screenwriter (making over $1000 a week in the 30s - a lot of money) but he said his Dad was always a true novelist. I'm not a writer, but this book inspires one to write.

There are many more kinds of novel writers and books in the market. This one is a classic of it's kind and a real novel for people who seek reality in their life. I can't describe this novel, but I can describe how I felt after I read it as well as what I feel about it right now. Am I really a Bandini, a selfish caring person shouts to the world 'I am here, listen to me!'. What ever I felt, it was simple and unique in my point of view. People live a life, struggle but never give up saying 'I am here', never say I am wrong, alone while never want to be, resist to others, think simple as much as they are, smart but can not proof in a single chance, selfish but always care others more, can not be assimilated. These what I felt about Bandini(main character).

You should read the book to see what I am trying to say. Some people don't like this book. I believe they don't want their reality to be
written and open public. Some don't try to read it at all, I believe those do prefer not to think much.

Sorry, Charlie. This is the book bukowski was TRYING to write when he wrote FACTOTUM. I love Bukowski, but this is the real thing. It hangs in there. Fante turns the camera on the main character while the others are mere foils for deeper probing. Whereas Bukowski builds a picture of society around his characters, Fante here truly explores values and value through one man's eyes. If you pick this book up and hate it, read it anyway. If you don't understand it, struggle through. If the only other book you've read is the bible, read this. Feel free to be offended, feel rejection and dejection. If you love Bukowski, you'll really like this. If you don't love Buk, that's okay too because Fante keeps the story moving without taking us all the way into the gutter. -Mike