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Women

Women

Literary FictionContemporary Literature
Pages
304
Published
1978
Language
English

Synopsis

Henry Chinaski is fifty, a minor literary celebrity after years of dead-end jobs and cheap rooms. The poetry readings pay, the fan mail arrives, and for the first time in his life women come looking for him rather than the other way round.

The book centres on his volatile affair with Lydia Vance, a sculptor he meets at a reading, and on the string of relationships that follow and overlap with it — women he meets through his readings, his mail, and his drinking. Each pairing runs much the same course: heavy drinking, jealousy, sex, break-ups, reconciliations, and a return to the typewriter.

Written in Bukowski's flat, unsparing prose and published in 1978, Women is his third novel, and the one that finds Chinaski successful without finding him any better at being a person.

Prose complexity
4/10

Vibe

GrittyDarkSatiricalReflective
Anti-Hero

Genres

Literary Fiction Contemporary Literature Classics Humor

About the author

C
Charles Bukowski

Henry Charles Bukowski was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Bukowski's writing was heavily influenced by the geography and atmosphere of his home city of Los Angeles, and is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. A prolific author, Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories, and six novels, eventually having over 60 books in print. In 1986 Time called Buko...

Characters

Henry ChinaskiProtagonist

Bukowski's alter ego, a middle-aged writer newly successful but still a heavy drinker.

Lydia VanceSupporting

A sculptor whose volatile, on-again-off-again relationship with Chinaski runs through much of the book.

All characters in Women

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