Ham on Rye - Softcover

Bukowski, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0876855575 ISBN 13: 9780876855577

Publisher: Black Sparrow Press,U.S., 1982

Synopsis

A down-and-out writer recalls his childhood, schooling, and the years leading up to World War II.

About this title

Review

Charles Bukowski's fourth novel, Ham on Rye, is the semi-autobiographical story of the early years of his alter ego Henry Chinaski. It is a finely written and honest account of the painful childhood of a boy marked out from his peers. Regularly beaten by his father, Chinaski is shown growing through his difficult and violent adolescence (struck with the worst case of acne his doctors have ever seen) through to the first jobs he can't and won't hold down. In this moving story of growing up Bukowski disciplines his muscular, concentrated writing and creates a novel that distils his poetry into the finest full-length piece of prose that he ever wrote. Bukowski is often good but in Ham on Rye he's great.

Sadly, best known as the alcoholic inspiration for the film Barfly (an experience he reflected on in his book Hollywood), it is as a poet, rather than a drunk, that Bukowski should be best remembered. His bitter, caustic, direct, humane, damaged poetry reflects a life dominated by poverty and booze. His poetry stretches over many, many volumes but Bukowski also wrote great novels: all of them have many faults but the first four books he wrote shine for similar reasons. Post Office and Factotum both dissect, quite brilliantly, the life of an angry, poor man forced to do mindless jobs, pushed around and considered mindless by the fools who force him to do them. Women, as Roddy Doyle points out in his short introduction, continues the themes but focuses on the numerous women who share his hero's bed and bottle. --Mark Thwaite

Review

"He brought everyone down to earth, even the angels" (LEONARD COHEN)

"In an age of conformity, Bukowski wrote about the people nobody wanted to be: the ugly, the selfish, the lonely, the mad" (Observer)

"Sometimes funny and always sad, Ham on Rye is written in an admirably hard, bare, vivid style" (Times Literary Supplement)

"Both powerful and, where appropriate, extremely funny" (Sunday Telegraph)

"Reflective, humane, tremendously evocative and absorbingly readable" (The Times)

"A scorching account of a childhood, adolescence, a life of ugliness, pain, escape, alcohol, loneliness. Often it is's funny - often it's disturbing - Ham on Rye is a powerful book" (RODDY DOYLE)

"A Laureate of American low life" (Time)

"This great novel is Bukowski's supremely honest account of a twisted childhood" (Howard Sounes author of Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life)

"The Thing about Bukowski is, when you read what he has to say, he's right" (SEAN PENN)

"Raunchy yet lyrical, occasionally hilarious while abysmally sad" (San Francisco Chronicle)

Edition details

• Publisher: Black Sparrow Press,U.S.
• Publication date: 1982
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0876855575
• ISBN 13: 9780876855577
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 283