Ham on Rye - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0876855591 ISBN 13: 9780876855591

Synopsis

Ham on Rye follows Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's alter-ego, through his troubled high school years to the beginning of a long and destructive struggle with alcoholism. Henry's early experiences are a mix of wry misadventure and emotional turmoil. He struggles with women, sports, his own writing, and, most heartbreakingly, his father - a monster of a man who looms large over almost every page of this wise and tough account of adolescence.

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

"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)

"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)

Edition details

• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0876855591
• ISBN 13: 9780876855591
• Binding: Hardcover