Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Bukowski, Charles - Michael F. Harper (review date 1983)

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Michael F. Harper (review date 1983)

SOURCE: “A Sordid, Obscene, Violent Underground Los Angeles,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 11, 1983, p. 2.

[In the following review, Harper compares Bukowski to Ernest Hemingway and asserts that the stories in Hot Water Music “are imbued with the perverse romanticism of adolescent disillusionment.”]

Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller are alive and ill and living in a rented room in East Hollywood—or so one might think after reading this collection of 36 short stories [Hot Water Music]. Sordid, obscene and violent, Bukowski's Los Angeles is more like Miller's Paris than Hemingway's, but our guide through this underworld responds to Hemingway's laconic stoicism, not Miller's apocalyptic rhapsodies.

Bukowski's narrators, who are sometimes “underground” writers like their creator, live in a world of cheap hotels “filled with prostitutes, winos, pickpockets,...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Thomas R. Edwards (review date 1972)
   2. David Evanier (review date 1973)
   3. William Feaver (review date 1974)
   4. Peter Ackroyd (review date 1974)
   5. Michael F. Harper (review date 1983)
   6. Carole Mansur (review date 1984)
   7. David Montrose (review date 1984)
   8. Julian Smith (essay date 1985)
   9. Norman Weinstein (essay date 1985)
   10. Russell Harrison (essay date 1994)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright