MUJERES.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI.

Personal Project.

“There is something uncontrollable in me; I think too much about sex. When I see a woman, I always imagine her in bed with me. It’s an interesting way to kill time in airports.”

In Women, one of Bukowski’s most acclaimed novels, his alter ego Henry Chinaski—the “dirty old man,” a born loser—finds himself at fifty with a growing literary reputation, some money in the bank, and women: mountains of women. They offer themselves at poetry readings, write him lewd letters, call him nonstop. Chinaski wants them all, wants to make up for his long years of forced abstinence. At the same time, this gigantic sexual marathon is a learning process, a journey of knowledge, in which Bukowski spares no sarcastic observations about himself, and in which the machismo of earlier texts is seriously eroded. All this joined by countless binges: alcohol as a mechanism that allows him to keep living, while simultaneously destroying him. Bukowski seems to suggest that the alternatives—respectable careers, literary or otherwise—are even more dehumanizing.