Why is Edward Bunker so good?

Every experience is a struggle, a conquer. Ex-criminal and writer, Edward Bunker has a true dimension, which is usually so difficult to get nowadays

by Maurizio Cucchi

In this period I’m discovering Edward Bunker. I happily read his autobiography, Education of a Felon, and two novels: No Beast So Fierce and Dog Eat Dog. An ex-criminal, that spent a total 18 years in a jail, that now holds the reader to the page with his terrible stories, so sinister and human, with a strange form of wisdom.

In his works there is a sense of non-centrality of man which I completely agree with. And so instants of airy suspension and hedonisms of characters that escapes every rhetoric. Bunker is incredibly true, not only because he tells about real-life horrors. He leads a tremendous laugh in the reader, e.g. when he sais that a murder can be incredibly ridiculous, clumsy or when the gigantic robber Diesel complained that, dragging on a rough soil a still-warm dead body, he starched his Ferragamo boots.

Bunker is also a screenwriter: for example in the fantastic Runaway Train, a incredibly violent movie, with a masterly Jon Voight. There, Bunker was also an actor, in the role of a prisoner. But he is a bad that sometimes is tender and naïve, too, even infantile. He has a mask that recall me Jack Palance. In the same time, I follow in the reading of his books. Animal Factory, for example, is good. So, why is Bunker a good writer? Probably because his characters and his point of view always have a direct, never mediated, sometimes turbulent, relationship with reality. Hence, this relationship is strong and live. Every experience is a struggle, a conquer, hence a happening. That is the reason why he has a true dimension, which is usually so difficult to get nowadays.