Women

The novel sets its whole tone in one sentence: 'I was 50 years old and hadn't been to bed with a woman for four years.' The narrator, Henry Chinaski — Bukowski's barely disguised alter ego — has quit his twelve-year post office job to try to be a writer, works on his first novel at night, and finds a bag of vegetables left outside his door every morning by his landlords. These first pages hold both loneliness and a strange tenderness.

Lydia Vance appears at a poetry reading in a bookshop and soon wants to sculpt Chinaski's head. The sculpting sessions are among the book's best scenes: the lump of clay on the breakfast table, Lydia's brown eyes, the tension between them, and the constant interruptions from children, her sister Glendoline and neighbours. When the bust is finished Chinaski recognises himself: the scars, the monkey mouth, the squinting eyes — 'a comic, happy man who knew he was lucky and wondered why'.

Bukowski never makes himself look good, and that is the book's greatest strength. Chinaski is jealous when Lydia talks to other men at a party, gets drunk and throws up in a garbage can, and has to swallow Lydia's remark at Venice Beach, as she watches a young Black man walk by: 'here I am with a guy twenty years older than me'. After a night of dancing Lydia calls him a jealous bundle of nerves. The hero describes his weakness, selfishness and absurdity with cool, sometimes savage humour.

The novel's second layer is a satire of the literary world. The party Chinaski throws as editor of a little magazine, full of shaggy poets who 'would steal the plumbing'; girls talking about his German translations over a fish dinner at Harry Ascot's; the car that ends up in a ditch on an icy Kansas City road; the 'immortal poet' drunkenly banging on doors in a university women's dorm — all of it is both funny and pathetic. At the Arkansas reading Chinaski drinks vodka mixed with orange juice on stage and tells the audience he is a virgin.

The hardest part of the book is its explicit sex. Bukowski veils nothing, and these scenes are the novel's main material; the Turkish translation does not soften them. Scenes such as Lydia drawing and explaining female anatomy to Chinaski on paper are both graphic and oddly comic, but many readers will find them heavy going. The hero's view of women is often objectifying — Bukowski doesn't criticise it, he simply shows it.

The chapters are very short and the novel reads almost breathlessly. «Women» is not for everyone, but few books in American literature expose their author so mercilessly.

• First-person autobiographical narration (Henry Chinaski — Bukowski's alter ego)
• Very short, episodic chapters
• Crude, dry, self-mocking humour
• Satirical portrait of the literary scene and poetry readings