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Ham on Rye (Paperback)
$12.78 - Save $1.42 (10%) - RRP $14.20 Free delivery worldwide (to United States and
all these other countries) Usually dispatched within 48 hours | |Short Description for Ham on RyeWith his fourth novel, legendary barfly Charles Bukowski follows the path of his alter ego Henry Chinaski through the high school years of acne and rejection, drinking his way through the Depression, and ends at the start of World War 2.
Full description- Publisher: Rebel inc.
- Published: 07 July 2001
- Format: Paperback 336 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Contemporary Fiction
- ISBN 13: 9781841951638 ISBN 10: 1841951633
- Sales rank: 5,322
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Reviews for Ham on Rye
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This book brings the whole Bukowski puzzle together
I love this book. For me it brings the whole Bukowski puzzle together meaning that I finally get what it is that people love about him.
The book is well written, funny, thoughtful and honest.
In a way I wish that I had read it sooner so that I would of had more empathy for his other stories and characters but then I think: Well it's a lot like life isn't it? First you meet the asshole, hate him, then you learn what it is that made him this way and learn to love the beast.
I truly love this book and am glad to have spent three glorious days with it. by kathleen Galvin -
Staff review
Ham on Rye
Charles Bukowski's fourth novel, Ham on Rye, is the semi-autobiographical story of the early years of his alter ego Henry Chinaski. As ever with Bukowski, this is muscular, direct writing at its colloquial best. It is also an unflinchingly 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 no-nonsense prose and creates a novel that distils his street-poetry into the finest full-length piece of writing that he ever produced. 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, and is marred by its misgogyny. Ham on Rye, however, is the place where Bukowski gets it just right; and if you've not had the pleasure, it is the place to start reading him.
by Mark Thwaite
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