by Charles Bukowski
|
| List Price: | $16.00 |
| Amazon Price: | $11.52 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. |
| You Save: | $4.48 (28%) |
| Average Rating: |  |
| Lowest New Price: | $8.00 |
| Availablitiy: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
|
 |
|
Product Description
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.
Customers who bought this item also bought
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Brilliant, 2010-02-06
Bukowski's brilliant semi-autobiographical novel is a darkly comic reflection on being an adolescent boy in suburban Los Angeles. He perfectly captures both the humor and the pain of growing up, with Ham on Rye being equally hilarious and terribly grim. If you have never read Bukowski this is where you should start.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 Not a Fan, 2009-09-29
I love reading autobiographical type books.............I have seen review after review giving this book 5 stars and statements about how absolutely great this book is. Maybe I just didn't get it but this was one of the most boring books I have ever attempted to read (I stopped reading about half way through the book). I don't get all the hoopla around this book. I was not impressed at all..........If it weren't for the profanity I would have thought this book was written for elementary school students. I'm sorry to all of the fans, but this was AWFUL.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
excellent, 2009-08-07
This is the second book I read by Charles Bukowski, he is easily my favorite writer. His words are raw and genius without being pretentoius. An amazing read, you feel his childhood you will be in awe at his emergence of brilliance under horrid circumstances.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 Bukowski: A Very Good but Not Great Writer, 2009-05-21
Bukowski comes clean on some things in this book, perhaps because, dropping back to childhood years, he couldn't help himself. Some things must have just bubbled up despite his outsider persona (more on this below). In this one we not only learn about his awful father and miserable upbringing, but about some of his early influences, as well as some writers and writing styles he recoiled from. He's more human in Ham on Rye.
Bukowski hates pretense. It's what makes him fascinating, and laudable. He hates it with the passion of a Celine, another misanthrope who knew how to write. And yet in this book, with its smattering of vulnerable details, we get a hint that in other books, tough guy Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's alter ego, is not an entirely pretense-free construct. Which is too bad, because the scant criticism Bukowski gets (he has mostly fans, few detractors)--that there's no uplift in his writing, no redemption--probably derives from this missing slice of his life.
And of course it should be said that Bukowski can be nasty. His takedown of Henry Miller in another book, for instance--whom he presents as an old man, living in Pacific Palisades, supposedly trying to cadge money from his younger visitor (a transparent aka)--gave me the creeps. Why savage your precursor?
Back to Ham on Rye: somewhere along the way I realized I was reading this novel/memoir as if it were a noir mystery--a Jim Thompson, say--which is a genre I like, but whose limitations I understand. And I realized too that I'd lowered my expectations, to accept Bukowski for what he is: a very good writer, but not a great one.I Think, Therefore Who Am I?
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Portrait of The Artist - Bukowski Style, 2009-04-15
As another reviewer pointed out below , Ham On Rye falls into the tradition of self-revelatory novels in which an author recounts their early developmental years. Bukowski sets Ham On Rye in Los Angeles during the depression and his settings and characters are poignantly realized. These are people you feel you've met.
The narrator/protagonist Henry Chinaski suffers through isolation in his early childhood, adolescence and young adulthood and he gradually grows to accept and embrace his isolation in some unexpected ways. Bukowski is brilliant when it comes to portraying the cruelty of adolescents toward those who don't quite fit in. Henry , always the outsider, has some moments of social acceptance and budding friendships but they never seem to develop. The real turn here is that while Henry struggles to understand his world the reader is gradually drawn into a sympathetic view of this guy.
Bukowski can be crude but ultimately this was a very engaging read for me, and I will certainly pick up his other novels as a result of having read this.
Price is accurate as of the date/time indicated. Prices and product availability are subject to change. Any price displayed on the Amazon website at the time of purchase will govern the sale of this product.
|
Store Categories
|