Name: Vojtech's review of Women by Charles Bukowski
Item: Women
Rating: 5
Author: Vojtech

Charles Bukowski

Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that would cripple Casanova. With all of Bukowski's trademark humor and gritty, dark honesty, this 1978 follow-up to Post Office and Factotum is an uncompromising account of life on the edge.

A Novel

Women

Brenda Lopez

People owed each other certain loyalties even if they weren't married. In a way, the trust should run deeper because it wasn't sanctified by the law.

Human relationships were strange. I mean, you were with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stopped. Then there was a short period when you weren't with anybody, then another woman arrived, and you ate with her and fucked her, and it all seemed so normal, as if you had been waiting just for her and she had been waiting for you. I never felt right being alone; sometimes it felt good but it never felt right.

" Potential," I said, “doesn't mean a thing. You've got to do it. Almost every baby in a crib has more potential than I have."

Vojtech

Her one drink had Cecelia giggling and talking explaining that animals had souls too. Nobody challenged her opinion. It was possible, we knew. What we weren't sure of was if we had any.

Was I trying to get even for something? Could I keep on telling myself that it was merely a matter of research, a simple study of the female? I was simply letting things happen without thinking about them. I wasn't considering anything but my own selfish, cheap pleasure. I was like a spoiled high school kid. I was worse than any whore; a whore took your money and nothing more. I tinkered with lives and souls as if they were my playthings. How could I call myself a man? How could I write poems? What did I consist of?

anjali

dear God is this novel a chore. The book is basically just one thing over and over and over again throughout. Poetry reading, getting drunk, fucking. Rinse and repeat.

I mean what do you expect from a dirty old man, dirty stories that remind you of the absurd ways some people love their lives.

I couldn't bring myself to keep reading it. It's so... bleak and sad and he still continues to be adored yet no one seems to like anyone genuinely, so I can't bring myself to want to see how their life goes. 

Roseanne

Shape Mismatch

The book is narrated by this alcoholic writer, who struggles, much like the narrator of Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground, with his defence mechanisms. 

The way Bukowski writes is rude, unsettling, raw, coarse, but honest, not in the slightest enamoured. It's this raw mess that speaks to you, makes you read through the text like listening to a story exchanged over beers in a pub from a drunk. 

The no bullshit, i'm giving it to you straight style can be appreciated, even for it's own sake, regardless of the plot that is conveyed in this form.

Varol Aksoy

lanet sapık herif, hayatımda sevdiğim ender pisliklerden birisin. :)

Sarthak Verma

It was the first book of its kind. And against all odds I liked it.
My only goal in life is to write as good as Bukowski.

If “Taxi Driver” actually was successful with women. 

Wild, gross, uncomfortable story (or rather a string of random moments) laid out using plain unemotional language. 

If the goal of literature is to make you feel something then this book was successful. Even if it did make me feel disgust.

While “Women” is definitely repetitive I feel it’s part of the goal. The main character is doomed by his raging alcoholism and addiction to sex. Drink, vomit. Have sex, leave. Drink more, vomit more. Have sex again. Drink, drink, vomit. You can feel the lack of end. And the nausea from all of it.

If “Taxi Driver” actually was successful with women. 

Wild, gross, uncomfortable story (or rather a string of random moments) laid out using plain unemotional language. 

If the goal of literature is to make you feel something then this book was successful. Even if it did make me feel disgust.

While “Women” is definitely repetitive I feel it’s part of the goal. The main character is doomed by his raging alcoholism and addiction to sex. Drink, vomit. Have sex, leave. Drink more, vomit more. Have sex again. Drink, drink, vomit. You can feel the lack of end. And the nausea from all of it.

(This is my first book by Bukowski.)

edith w.

From blog: 

I was much younger, much more naive, and much, much, much less feminist when I read my first Bukowski, Post Office. Chinaski, the autobiographical protagonist in many of Bukowski’s novels, is a hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-loving gentleman of letters who has as many hangovers in a year as he does female conquests. And he never seems to blink an eye. When I first encountered him all those years ago, I fancied myself quite in love for a while. Such freedom of spirit and expression. And the sex; so much sex. I was all sorts of taken with it. I had put off reading Women, the last in the Chinaski trilogy, for reasons I can’t quite remember now, but I picked it about a month ago. Dear Lord! What a f-ing horrible man. How could I ever have had a soft spot for him? How could I ever have even have liked him!? Abusive, nasty, misogynistic, horrible, horrible man. That’s the point, of course, and exactly what we’re supposed to think of him, but still. Horrible! To hell with freedom and love and passion, the man’s a f-er and reading about his escapades was torturous (“I got drunk, I got up, I slept with some poor woman, I wrote a poem, I fell over, I got drunk, I got up, I slept with…”). I thought I was going to have to scrub myself with bleach to get rid of him from my mind, but it turns out he hadn’t infiltrated it all that deeply this time. Bukowski was certainly one of the most talented writers of his generation, and his depictions of ordinary, far-from-perfect lives were very affecting at times but MAN, I hate that Chinaski. By definition, I suppose I probably now hate that Bukowski too.

Omar AlHashmi

Before reading, I would like all the women who have read this book to to look at the question at the end and answer please in a comment. 


My experience with this book was strange. When I sat down first with the book, I read around 20 pages. I felt so uncomfortable. I felt so awkward reading this thing. I didn't feel good reading it. I kept thinking "why am I reading a book about this disgusting mysoginst?". I didn't want to give up on the book so quickly, so I said to myself I would give it another couple of sittings. The next sitting I had with the book, something happened.... I laughed. Out loud. First of all, it's hard enough to make people laugh just by text. It's even more hard to get ME to laugh. Because in general I don't laugh out loud. But with this book, it was so brazen and over the top and unafraid with its comedy that I found myself laughing multiple times. I may have laughed around 15 times during the entire reading, which is unprecedented for me. The book is definitely entertaining once you let loose and accept the disgusting habits of Henry Chinaski. The book doesn't really have a straight forward structure. It's just Henry moving from woman to woman and what happens with them. The problem with this sort of format is that the book is always relying on every substory to be good. When they can't all be. So at times you get these uninteresting parts where nothing exciting happens. Nevertheless. I would never have expected myself giving this book a 4/5 when I first read this. 

Now I was just curious about one thing. How is it a lot of females like this book? I understand it's entertaining and trying to be funny, but the amount of misogyny that happens is insane. I mean I was even recommended this book by a random girl in Kinokuniya who said it was one of his bests. So I just want perspective. I dont know if alot of other Bukowski have this, but why did you like this book despite the way the main character treats women?

Towards the end it gets pretty damn repetitive. Get drunk, smoke ciggies, hate life, write poem, fall in love with woman, fuck it up, repeat. All that aside one of the most genuinely enjoyable books I've ever read so what do I know 

Olivera Mitić

Well, this is one of the instances where I'm not sure how I should start my review. It's not because I don't have anything to say, because trust me, I have sooo many opinions, I just have no idea where my rant should begin. 

First of all, how the fuck is Bukowski this popular? Please someone explain this to me, because I can't wrap my mind around the fact that people actually love and worship him as an author. And how did he not have like a thousand children and didn't die of liver cirosis or STDs?

Now that I got this out of the way, I can actually focus on the rest. 

So, Henry Chinaski...wow, just wow. Shittiest excuse for a man I've ever seen. There are two things that make his character even worse than he is: 
1. he is based on the author
2. he is aware of his flaws and what he's doing wrong, yet he just accepts it like he can't influence it

I wanted to yell 'OTHER PEOPLE HAVE A HARD LIFE TOO' into his face like all the freakin' time. 

He is so unlikable, he's so vulgar and rude and acts like he's the only goddamn creature in this world that's worth anything. He doesn't have one single human interaction with anyone and is so misogynystic that it hurt. Speaking as a woman, I was offended by this on every possible level. My guesses are that you can only enjoy this if you are a really oblivious person (and probably a male). 
*not trying to be offensive here, just giving my opinion*

The plot didn't exist. It was a repetitive cycle of drinking, having sex and going to horse races, with the occasional poetry reading here and there. 

There was a scene right at the beginning where Lydia tells him that he doesn't understand women, and this is pretty much the summary of this book. He doesn't understand them, yet he likes to pretend like he does and like he is dominant over them in every way. He sees them as a sum of their body parts and gets rid of them as soon as they serve their purpose. This book would have gotten 2 stars had there not been several occasions on which he rapes some of the girls. This was definitely it for me.

Somewhere near the end he has an encounter with a petit woman and he says something along the lines of 'it will be like raping a child' while thinking about the possible intercourse with her. 
How on earth can you like a character who says stuff like this? 

We get some 300 pages of text, all focusing on someone who lives an emtpy life. There is no moral to this, no story, no profound reveal at the end. We just witness someone not knowing how to properly live and make something that's actually pleasant. It's a bunch of self pitty mixed with extremely bad decisions. 

Chinaski (and persumably Bukowski) was a swine with no respect towards anything, and I truly believe he shouldn't be half as popular as he is.

I will end this now, because I don't want to get even more angry.

Flavia

Non ho un vero e proprio commento. Squallido e ripetitivo.

Low life writer and alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. Now, at the age of fifty, he is living the life of a rock star, running three hundred hangovers a year and a sex life that would cripple Casanova. Women is a riotous and uncompromisingly vivid account of life on the edge. Women follows Charles Bukowski's classic bestsellers Post Office and Factotum. Bukowski's Beat Generation writing reflects his slum upbringing, his succession of menial jobs and his experience of low life urban America. He died in 1994 and is widely acknowledged as one of the most distinctive writers of the last fifty years.

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Women by Charles Bukowski

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