Product Description

Arturo Bandini is a twenty-year-old burgeoning writer, spending his days hungry for success, life and food in a dingy hotel in Los Angeles. Full of the enthusiasm of youth, and the thrill of having one short story published, the reality of poverty and prejudice has hit him hard. He meets a local waitress, Camilla Lopez, and embarks on a strange and strained love-hate relationship. Slowly, but inexorably, it descends into the realms of madness. Fante depicts the highs and lows of the emotional state of Bandini with conviction, but without easy sentiment. In Ask the Dust, Fante is truly 'telling it like it is' as a poverty-stricken son of an immigrant in 'perfect' California.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26494 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From the Back Cover
Arturo Bandini is a struggling writer lodging in a seedy LA hotel. While basking in the glory of having had a single short story published in a small magazine, he meets local waitress Camilla Lopez and they embark on a strange and strained love-hate relationship. Slowly, but inexorably, it descends into the realms of madness.

Ask The Dust is one of the truly great, yet unsung, American novels of the twentieth century. A tough and unsentimental story with a soft and tender heart, it remains as fresh and affecting as the day it was written.

With an introduction by Charles Bukowski.

About the Author
JOHN FANTE was born in 1909 to poor Italian-American parents in Colorado. Following a hard and religious upbringing, he ventured west in the 1930s to become a writer. After publishing four superb but commercially disappointing novels, he became a successful screen writer, but never forgave himself for leaving his true calling. He died in 1980.

Customer Reviews

how passion truly manifests itself
to anyone who feels passionate and yet unable to express him or herself, to anyone who has ever fallen truly in love (and I mean the one where they seep into your veins like a virus and infect your every moment), to anyone who feels ashamed of themselves for no other reasons than those society enforces upon them, and to those who feel that something quite beautiful exists within them and no-one seems to care - please hunt for this book, read every word without missing a single letter, and don't tear from it until you reach the end. A brutal encounter between the Nietzschean quest for total autonomy, and the demands of living in a world where passion and love are not choices, but curses. A narrator who understands himself and his world, yet could not be further from the truth (if there is one). He fights himself, the world, Camilla Lopez, purely because he is caught in an existence where you are what you do yet feel what you are.

for christ's sake read this - I have still not discovered anything quite as beautiful.

Like finding gold in the city garbage dump
That other great Californian writer Charles Bukowksi writes in the preface to Ask The Dust that this was the first book he found in LA city library where the words jumped out of the page. Fante writes in a beautifully simple style, following the frustrated Arturo Bandini as he recounts his time in LA, constantly finding himself in love and trouble. Ask The Dust is part of a trilogy in the Bandini series and is probably the best, although Wait Until Spring Bandini and Dreams From Bunker Hill are also excellent novels that have the same simple, powerful unaffected style of John Fante. Fans of his work might be interested in checking out the work of John's son, Dan Fante - whose novel Chump Change is written in a similar style fusing together the old and new worlds of the American city.

A book to make you laugh and cry
John Fante was a fresh new voice in the 1930s, and his raw, emotional, flowing prose seems fresh even now. Today, John Fante's sheer honesty stands out as if he found a true window into the soul that later writers never found. However, owing to a number of different reasons, Fante was far from prolific over his 74 years of life, and he never gained widespread recognition of his talents as a writer. So you may only find one book by John Fante, but what a book it is! That book is "Ask the Dust". It has its faults but in my view it is unquestionably a great book that deserves to be recognised as a true classic of twentieth century literature.

It is the tale of a young Italian American called Arturo Bandini, who moves down to Los Angeles from a cold northern town in Colorado, to follow his dream of becoming a great writer. Bandini is a fantastic character and he appears in a number of other novels by John Fante. Bandini is over-emotional, sometimes aggressive and hateful but sometimes gentle and vulnerable. He is blessed with huge ambition and an apparently unshakable confidence in his abilities, while at the same time he is cursed with a despairing sense of self-doubt. Above all, he is touchingly and brutally honest about himself and the world around him.

Bandini is a great literary creation that manages to delight and frustrate the reader in equal measure. Bandini is, in essence, John Fante's alter-ego, so perhaps his creation was made simpler by his similarity to the author. But Fante brings his creation to life with verve, humour and honesty that makes the book still seem refreshing after all these years.

"Ask the Dust" finds Arturo Bandini alone in Los Angeles, living in a tatty hotel room with only enough money to eat oranges. His only company is Pedro the mouse, but even he deserts Bandini when he no longer has enough money for food. He has managed to publish one short story under the tutelage of his literary hero, J.C. Hackmuth, and he attempts to continue along the path of literary greatness while all the distractions of LA life, as well as his own hunger and poverty, conspire to distract him.

Bandini longs to own some of the riches of the American dream, and above all he longs for acceptance. When he meets the Mexican waitress Camilla Lopez, the tale of the poverty-stricken artist becomes a tale of aching desire, longing, confusion and madness. John Fante lovingly describes the confused feelings of Bandini for the beautiful Camilla; the longing he feels mixed with the strange disgust, the feelings of inadequacy and fear of rejection. It is when Fante is writing about these extreme emotions that you really feel the power of his writing. There are countless examples of the flowing beauty and power of his prose. One that comes to mind is his description of when Bandini goes to a sleazy dancing hall and ogles the dancers along with the other men, but stops to notice the men around him "shouting their share of a sick joy that belonged to me."

Camilla and Bandini's feelings for each other alternate from a strange longing to a violent, mutual disgust. They insult each other because of their non-American origins, something which hurts them both. In one of the most moving passages of the book, Bandini pours forth his feelings on feeling left out, always feeling to be an outsider because of his Italian origins, after he insults Camilla. This is a theme that comes up a lot in John Fante's work: the outsider, the bullied one, finding himself victimising and bully others, only to deeply regret his actions later. Fante is a master at honestly portraying the multitude of conflicting emotions people feel when they are in love, when they feel desire, when they have ambition, when they feel rejected and when they feel confusion about their very identity. If you have ever felt any of these emotions you will find something you recognise in "Ask the Dust".

John Fante is an unfairly neglected author and this novel is an unfairly neglected classic. He was only saved from total obscurity because Charles Bukowski championed his books after Fante's death, and this is unfortunate because it suggests that Fante was in some way subordinate to Bukowski. They were two very different writers, and Fante predated Bukowski by many years. The book's not perfect, but then its author was still young when he wrote it, and there's no telling what great books he could have created if he had continued along the path of the writer, and continued at the craft with the discipline of his early years. I strongly advise you to get this book, make yourself comfortable, and savour each beautiful sentence.