I have just read Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye in double-quick time. It’s urgent, powerful, raw – and like Henry Chinaski himself, doesn’t pull any punches. It’s a book which also peels back layers on society, on belonging (and not belonging), on the treadmill of vacuous routine. Pointlessness is never very far away, and romance nowhere.
I wish I’d read it thirty years ago; I think it would have changed me as a writer – maybe both the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of my prose.
As I was reading it I couldn’t help but think of Meanwhile in Dopamine City (which I couldn’t finish) and how Bukowski knocks Pierre out of the park.
Ian Gouge - Writer 