On the quest to find other books and/or knock more off my pile, I spent the last of my xmas money on this.

The novel before his famous "Ask the Dust", but written in the 1930's and was left unpublished until 1985 because it was too riske for the time. Once again Arturo Bandini is a wretched writer living with his Catholic mother and destined to be a nun sister, who rely on him to be the breadwinner, but can't keep a job until his Uncle Frank sets him up with a dead weight position at the cannery making 25 cents an hour among the Mexicans and Filipinos. His big ego of a self professed writer, proud to be American, complicated vocabulary comes off at times as arrogant and as a bigot, but it's more like a insecure, revengeful individual who says things to spite others and make himself feel giant. (Hilarious!) Without knowing his perspective, you can imagine that any person from the outside would think that he is insane... well even knowing his POV, he still comes off as crazy - killing crabs to win the war, sneaking nudie cutouts and having a name and personality for each, swooning over women he notices randomly and retraces their footsteps obsessively. Pretty spectacular.