“You are thirty minutes late.”
“Yes.”
“Would you be thirty minutes late to a wedding or a funeral?”
“No.”
“Why not, pray tell?”
“Well, if the funeral was mine I’d have to be on time. If the wedding was mine it would be my funeral.”
I had been wanting to read a Charles Bukowski novel after seeing the illuminating documentary, Born into this.
As Goodreads describes Ham on Rye, ‘Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski‘.
What started out seemingly mediocre turned into a tour de force about one of the most vial, detesting characters I have ever read – Henry Chinaski. He could well be the greatest outcast character ever written in contemporary American Literature. This book tells so much about the ugly untold social underbelly (aspire to be rich, but really are poor) of North America during its post Depression era.
The high testosterone, sense of alienation and machismo of adolescence is brilliantly captured in Ham on Rye. You really feel entrapped in the mind of this seriously flawed individual, but by the end greatly…
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