Women is a poetic masterpiece

Release Date:

1978

IMDB:
written By:
REVIEW OF A
Book
Category:

“Humanity, you never had it from the beginning. That was my motto.” – Henry Chinaski

Women by Charles Bukowski reintroduces a recurring, yet hardly beloved character in Bukowski’s works, Henry Chinaski. Chinaski established himself in Factotum, Post Office, and Ham on Rye as an alcoholic, aspiring writer who can not keep a job or a girlfriend for longer than a couple days. In Women, Chinaski has finally found success as a writer and a poet, but continues his self-destructive ways with women and alcohol, finding only temporary satisfaction in both. As the main character puts it himself “I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn’t make for an interesting person. I didn’t want to be interesting, it was too hard.”

True to the title, Women focuses on the parade of females through Chinaski’s life, and the love and beauty, yet ultimate disappointments and dissatisfactions they bring. From Lydia, his hometown, on-again-off-again lover and abuser, to Joanna, a fan of good art and sex, to Tammie, a young beauty who is more wild and drug addled than Chinaski himself, his constant carousel of women provide Chinaski with short glimpses of love and partnership, but with no nurturing from his end and with his insatiable hunger for alcohol and new women, these romances are just differing degrees of short lived sexual forays.

Full of his signature, simple prose and dark honesty and humor, Bukowski does not dull any edges of this seemingly autobiographical account of booze filled nights repeatedly turning into hungover mornings next to rotating women. The book borders on offensive with heavy doses of vulgarity and misogyny as Chinaski falls into a repetitive loop of poetry readings, drunkenness, and new women. In truth, the book offends due to it’s unabashed, unashamed realism. The true beauty in Bukowski’s works lie in the depressing yet heartful descriptions of unfulfillment and dissatisfaction.

“Human relationships didn’t work anyhow. Only the first two weeks had any zing, then the participants lost their interest. Masks dropped away and real people began to appear: cranks, imbeciles, the demented, the vengeful, sadists, killers. Modern society had created its own kind and they feasted on each other. It was a duel to the death–in a cesspool.”

After years of playing starving artist and working his way through countless bottles and women in Bukowski’s other novels, Chinaski has finally found fame and success, but with it, only more empty bottles, more temporary women, and more dissappointments.

Like Chinaski himself, this novel sends unmistakable hints of love and tenderness, only to repeatedly and expectedly offend and disappoint, painting an all too realistic picture of love lost. Though the descriptions of sexual conquests and drug binges may shock at first before turning repetitive and even dull, the musings of the main character when he is thinking clearly are quintessential Bukowski, finding beauty and having continuous hope in life despite what continues to be confirmed as a meaningless existence.

Share:

More Reviews

The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History book cover
Timothy Meyer

The Monuments Men is a interesting take on World War II

Certainly, there are as many ways to write engaging and immersive literary non-fiction as there are to write engaging and immersive literary fiction. Oftentimes, the best subjects for such works are the strange corner-cases of history, unexplored lacunas that public consciousness is scarcely aware and could stand to be better informed of. Such, I assumed,

Read More »
The spectacular now book to film adaptation review
Timothy Meyer

A journey through youth with The Spectacular Now

THE SPECTACULAR NOW examines the lives of high school teens in a manner that doesn’t trivialize, sexualize or demean them. At times, the film may succeed in sentimentalizing high school and cannot quite decide precisely how its audience is meant to feel about its protagonist, Sutter Keely (Miles Teller), but in the end, the film

Read More »

Send Us A Message