“Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.” This is the first novel I read by Bukowski and I liked it regardless of the fact that the protagonist, Henry Chinaski, is incredibly unlikable. A misogynistic man without any perspective or ambition but a mind full of vulgarities. He drowns himself in alcohol on a daily basis and by that detaches himself from any possible responsibility in life. The only things he’s somewhat aiming for throughout the story are his sexual encounters with the random women he meets and immediately sexualizes (the latter made me uncomfortable & disgusted me countless times), the nearest bar and some new job he’s already planning on losing after the few days or weeks it takes to make the bit of money essential for him to survive. He aspires to be a writer, even sells one of his short stories at one point, yet doesn’t pursue this dream somewhat sufficiently. Chinaski does pretty much everything you can do to lose any kind of connection, to others as well as to his own emotions. He constantly deprives himself of anything meaningful, anything healthy or well working, instead fleeing from one place to another and life itself. Though he’s more than unlikable, his cynical and indifferent take on life managed to draw me into the story very quickly and his descriptions of all these workplaces and the people around him were, if not misogynistic for once, quite funny actually. His thoughts were brutally honest and Bukowski’s language underlined that rawness perfectly. That was what made the story stand out to me the most. I read that this book is believed to be Bukowski’s most autobiographical one and after having read one of his poetry collections, I could indeed see so many parallels between his life and the life of Henry Chinaski. It was all there: the drinking, the women (and the INCREDIBLE misogyny), the cynicism, the gambling and horse races and most of all, the detachment and deep loneliness.