07/09/2026
Ook mooi onder de NL titel, "Kind onder kannibalen". Het leek een goed idee (lees: lucratief) om de heruitgave daarvan (2014) te openen met een voorwoord door Hugo Borst en Leo Verheul.
Ham on Rye is Charles Bukowski's 1982 novel about a boy named Henry Chinaski growing up in Los Angeles during the Great Depression. It's the first in Bukowski's loosely autobiographical Chinaski trilogy, and it's probably his best book less performative than his later work, more vulnerable, and genuinely painful. Bukowski wrote about the ugly, the drunk, the beaten-down. Here he writes about where that ugliness came from.
Henry Chinaski is born during the Depression, the son of a brutal, failed father and a passive, overwhelmed mother. His father beats him regularly, sometimes for punishment, sometimes for no reason at all. His mother watches. Henry develops acne so severe that the neighborhood kids call him a "monster." He has no friends. He drinks his first beer at twelve. He discovers girls, but they recoil from his face. He discovers writing, but no one cares. The novel follows Henry from childhood through high school, from the baseball field to the hospital, from drunken brawls to the first faint glimmers of his future. It ends with him standing on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, having just learned of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He's about to be drafted. He's about to leave home. He's about to become the Bukowski we think we know. But in this book, he's just a boy trying to survive.
Bukowski wrote Ham on Rye late in his career, after he'd become famous for his dirty, drunken, semi-autobiographical novels Post Office and Factotum. He claimed he didn't enjoy writing it; it was too close to the bone. The title refers to a meal he was forced to eat in the hospital after his acne surgery a ham sandwich on rye bread which tasted like nothing, which was the point. His life had been tasteless, empty, a series of beatings and humiliations. He survived. He wrote about it. He wrote Ham on Rye so that other people who felt like monsters might see themselves and keep going. It's not a happy book. It's not a hopeful book. It's an honest one.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/4ulVy00
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