Charles Bukowski
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 127
Average rating: 4.5 of 5
"Was I the only person who was distracted by this future without a chance?" 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.
So asks (p. 245) Bukowski's alter ego, Henry Chinaski, as this gripping romansbildung draws to a conclusion. The rather mysteriously-titled Ham on Rye is undoubtedly Bukowski's finest and most obviously autobiographical novel. In it, he gives us a variably chilling, pathetic, hilarious, and defiant portrait of Chinaski's first 20 years, taking us right up to the attack on Pearl Harbor and Chinaski on his way to the Skid Row existence brutally chronicled in Factotum, the second volume in the Chinaski series.
There's something heart-wrenching in Bukowski's description of the early years of his anti-hero Chinaski. A loser father who vents his self-hatred by sadistically beating his son; a spineless mother who can't stand up for either herself or her son--and whom Chinaski loves as little as he does his father; a sometimes comic assortment of misfit schoolmates who attach themselves to a reluctant Chinaski; boring, unrewarding, and mind-killing classes in primary, middle, and high schools; the wondrous discovery of books in the public library; the horrors of out-of-control acne, so like leprosy in both appearance and social consequences; the initial vagueries and eventually fires of pubescent longing; the (d)evolution of an abused and lonely boy into a hard-drinking, hot-tempered, bullying youth; and the beginning of a series of one dead-end job after another: these are the moments in Henry Chinaski's life captured in the novel. It's little wonder that by the story's midpoint, Chinaski is a young cynic, disgusted with the "proper" socially successful world to which his parents aspire. As he tells us (p. 174),
'The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of a--holes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.'
Bukowski's brilliant, disturbing novel is a chronicle of hope defeated and tenderness abused. By novel's end, Henry Chinaski has turned from a lovable, mistreated child into a genuinely unlikeable lost soul. To a certain extent, in later novels and in real life, both Chinaski and Bukowski will save themselves through art. But the climb up from the hellish youth and adolescence chronicled here will be long and difficult.
Editorial Review:
In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.
