Inspiration
Fante was one of the first writers to portray the tough times faced by many people in Depression-era Los Angeles. Robert Towne has called Ask the Dust the greatest novel ever written about Los Angeles.
The American author Charles Bukowski cites John Fante's work as a significant influence on his own writing, in particular Ask the Dust. Bukowski, who befriended the older author towards the end of Fante's life, wrote a foreword to this novel for the Black Sparrow Press reprint edition. Bukowski states in this forward "Fante was my god" Bukowski chronicled their relationship in his short story "I Meet the Master", although in the story, the author is referred to as "John Bante" and his book is called "Sporting Times? Yeah?".
Ask the Dust contains thematic similarities to Knut Hamsun's 1890 novel Hunger. Fante was a great admirer of Hamsun. The title Ask the Dust derives from Knut Hamsun's novel Pan from 1894, in which Lt. Glahn tells the story about the Girl in the tower:
"The other one he loved like a slave, like a crazed and like a beggar. Why? Ask the dust on the road and the falling leaves, ask the mysterious God of life; for no one knows such things. She gave him nothing, no nothing did she give him and yet he thanked her. She said: Give me your peace and your reason! And he was only sorry she did not ask for his life."
In David Foster Wallace's 1987 novel The Broom of the System, Lavache "Stoney" Beadsman has a wooden leg with a hidden drawer in which he keeps marijuana cigarettes and other illegal substances. Ch. 4 of Ask the Dust refers to a character named Benny Cohen, who "had a wooden leg with a little door in it. Inside the door were marijuana cigarettes. He sold them for fifteen cents apiece" (37).
Read more about this topic: Ask The Dust
Famous quotes containing the word inspiration:
“The ironies in the commonplace are my inspiration and delight.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognise the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice. Here, as elsewhere, practice must precede perfection.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Poets should be lawgivers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead, the civil code, and the day’s work. But now the two things seem irreconcilably parted.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)