Title: Women
Author: Charles Bukowski
Length: 304 pages
Year Written: 1978
Why I chose this book: This was a contender for my book club a few years back, and I'd always been curious about it.
Charles Bukowski's Women follows a specific recipe: introduce a woman, describe her affair with the main character Henry Chinaski, then get rid of her before the next woman comes along. There are really many, many women in Women.
Chinaski is 50 years old, having recently left his job at the post office to become an author. He reaches a decent level of fame with his fiction and poetry, most notably in the number of women who shamelessly throw themselves at him, through rotary phone calls and snail mail, mostly. It is an autobiographical tale with a the label "fiction" loosely veiling it. The entire premise of Women is that Chinaski is fucking a slew of women as research for his writing. This is not without moments of self-reflection, mild epiphanies, and varied human emotion, but for the most part, it is about fucking. His sexual escapades with women, who are generally half his age, are usually ridiculous and often unsavory. But they are realistic, they are entertaining.
After watching a show about Bukowski on Netflix, and seeing him scream at his wife that she's a whore for going out to dance every night, I wanted to read his fiction and compare it to my shallowly-built perception of him. It all checks out. He is tall, fat, drunk, and charmingly chauvinistic, if there is such a thing. As a writer, he is honest if nothing else. His style of fiction writing is in some ways inspirational and other ways directionless. Personally, I prefer his poetry—I bought his collection of poems Love Is A Dog From Hell at the same time as this book and found it more enjoyable overall.
Rating: 7.7/10
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