Tropic of Cancer

Rating:
Summary: A Great Personal Novel!
Review: This book was banned for about 30 years. This is due to the questionable topics and language that Miller delves into. He uses a certain c word at least a couple hundred times. I would be very interested in a word count to see exactly. I was written some where are 34' and finally printed, in America, in 1961.

Now the book really doesn't have a story in the modern sense. It is far ahead of its time. It resembles the writing of the Beats and the Psychodelics of the 50's and 60's. The style is very stream of consciousness. There is no plot to speak of. It is all about Miller trying to survive in Paris, with no money.

Written in first person the language is straight out of the gutter. There are parts that are written in French. I could only pick out a few words and usually didn't even bother to try. It is usually in the dialogue. The characters are mostly Americans trapped in Paris during the 30's. Miller is haunted by his wife, Mona. She left him to return to America. She never actually is in the book, but he thinks about her often. She fits into his idea about America. They are both mythological to him. Beautiful and dangerous. He speaks of returning to America, and his wife, but it is never more then a fleeting thought. The dark reality of Paris sings to him. He is at home there as brutal as the city was.

Anyone who is well read should at least have an opinion on Miller. He is an important American author. You can see his influence on later American writers, including Kerouac, Bukowski and others. Along with Tropic of Cancer, I recommend another recent Amazon pick: The Losers' Club by Richard Perez, another personal novel obviously influenced by Miller.

Rating:
Summary: A good, honest novel
Review: This is a novel about Miller's experience bumming around Paris in the early 1930's. A large part of the incidents related in it deal with his experiences with the people who let him stay with them and feed him. He was more often than not in desperate straits, and was often forced to sleep on the streets.

Perhaps the most appropriate expression for the situation of Miller and his friends would be "on the margins." In that way the book sort of has a Dostoyevskyan flavor. Even if they are having some success they are never far from the margin. Most of these friends are expatriate American intellectuals who are going through spiritual crises or have gotten themselves in trouble by dissolute behavior.

Fornication is probably the main passion of Miller and his friends. The subject of fornication is brought up right from the novel's beginning. Females of the loose or disagreeable variety are not uncommonly refered to by that obscene word refering to the outer female genitals which begins with a C. Miller describes two of the most memorable prostitutes that he patronized at the beginning of the book. Another incident is where he meets a blonde french gal at a nightclub. He wishes to have some copulation with her and she manages to get him to give her 120 francs by telling a melodramatic story about how she is taking care of her very sick mother. They go back to her place and peform coitus. He dosen't quite believe her story and while she is downstairs supposedly checking on her mother, he fetches her purse, grabs the 120 francs and runs off with them.

Miller is involved greatly in his friend's love lives. One incident that stands-out involves the rich lady Irene and his friend Carl. Irene wants Carl to run off with her to Borneo and Carl wants Miller to go with them. He offers Irene for Miller to use carnally. Then there is his friend Van Norden. One night they catch the eye of a prostitute and return to where Miller is living with Van Norden and Miller watches his friend operate on the hooker but Van Norden is unable to consumate the exercise despite great effort.

Then there is MIller's East Indian friends. The first one is a decayed merchant who has an injury to his arm or something and speaks often, using the f-word, of his sub-par abilities in carnal technic in contrast to another East Indian friend of theirs. There is the publicist for Gahndi who arrives in Paris urgently wishing to visit a brothel and Miller obliges, he being a connisseur of those institutions in the city. While Miller is in the next room waiting for his own sesssion to begin, he apparently misunderstands a question from the publicist from the next room about where the bathroom is in the facility. He tells the fellow to use the bidet, a french word for a bathing implement designed to wash the genitals or something Well, this fellow ends up excreting in a....anyway, I really don't understand how the bidet was used in this situation.

Then there is the week-end trip to the coast city of La Havre. Miller hooks up with his friends Fillimore and Collins.Collins has just evaded trouble because he had fallen in love "with a boy." Miller meets an ex-hooker named Marcelle and they "play with each other" under the dinner table at Jimmy's tavern. Jimmy's wife started to fall in love with Collins and she started this brawl on their last night in town with this Russian girl whom she saw as a rival for Collins's attentions. Then there is Fillimore...

There is plenty of non-sexual material in this book. The best part of the book is the portrayal of life in a Paris which is quite different from that of Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Gertrude Stein, etc. It is a life of living in utterly filthy apartments of living on the street, of hookers, of begging. I enjoyed Miller's portrayal of struggling in this life(as I enjoyed his rather brief sketch of similar living conditions of his in America).At one point he gets room and board from a Russian truck driver named Serge who offers this in return for Miller giving him English lessons. But he is unable to stand sleeping on a matress surrounded by awful smells, bedbugs, and rotten food. He abandons Serge after a short time.

Miller is at his best when he is telling a story. I did not enjoy his flights of unintelligible mystical mumb-jumbo that he inserts several times between the incidents. Such rhetoric immediately greets the reader at the beginning of the book...

In this book there is plenty of obscene material. The S-word is used wihtout reticence, as are the C-word, the B-word, the p-word and particularly the f-word. The N-word is used once by the narrator; I wasn't happy about that. In any case I liked the characters of this book, I related to many of them.

Rating:
Summary: Reflection on Tropic of Cancer
Review: -
Synopsis: Tropic of Cancer unabashedly depicts Millers' escapades as a down-and-out writer in Paris during the early 1930s, "bumming around" Montparnesse with a colorful, earthy, and rebellious group of expatriates and artists.

Review: Miller is nourished by decay. He observes how the higher activities - love, sex, creation, fidelity, art - have lost their divinity, dignity, poetry. Sex seems to him dry and painful; work is absurd; death is meaningless, and literature is dead. The only sort of goodness we are now capable of is to blow ourselves to bits. But somehow Miller, despite his rage and pollution, seems innocent. His book seems a lament. His potency is founded in showing the cruelty and filth, but these would have no affect on him or us unless we also feel its opposites - kindness and purity. Whenever he records the ugliness of his surroundings, he has discharged them and their effects from his soul, as in a sort of exorcism. And this is why he appears an innocent soul. Because innocent souls have an unreasoned but keen taste for suffering, and nothing seduces them so easily as does the view of a martyr. In this instance, nature is the martyr; all of her processes polluted and corrupted by humans.
Miller's language is incisive, clear, potent, fresh...and new, a new sort of language, a language of the underworld translated into English. His fast-paced, absurdly wild and filthy existence is beautifully documented; there is something in the surrounding which reminds one of the film Casablanca, perhaps the charm of desperation.
He is prone to philosophies, and some readers will prefer the adventure to the contemplation. Also, his treatment of women is acutely unorthodox but should be further examined before being criticized.

Quotation: 'I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am...' (from the first page)
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Rating:
Summary: Worth reading, though more turgid than expected
Review: The Millerian tendency to reconceptualize life's quotidian meanderings is amplified by the continuous and deliberate attempt to shock the reader into surprising epiphanies concerning the value of intimacy, however unclean, and its potential to yield unexpected, great wisdom -- though often at the cost of great psychic pain and philosophical and psychological doubt that reaches to the core of modern identity.

Also, the sex is great.

Rating:
Summary: Up and down
Review: Well, it's exactly like what Buk said about Miller: "When he's good, he's good".
When he isn't he is quite boring. Many excellent passages encapsulated in too much drivelling.

Rating:
Summary: So good I read it twice!
Review: This is Miller's episodic account of his down-and-out days in Paris of the 1930s, when it was no longer 'chic' to be an expatriot. Hemingway and Fitzgerald were long gone. And Miller is outside the realm of the famous writers of his day (they probably wouldn't want anything to do with him.) Tropic of Cancer gives one of the best accounts ever of an artist's life and the endless humiliation and vulnerability of an artist and what he must go through for his art. It ain't glamorous folks. What saves it from being depressing is Miller's energetic present-tense style and his infectious passion. It's not a perfect book by any means -- not 'polished' fiction that would easily find a publisher even today. But I read the book twice! It totally inspired me! And not a day goes by since reading it that I don't think about it!

Also recommended: The Losers' Club by Richard Perez

Rating:
Summary: Written in blood
Review: This is an excellent book to turn young readers between the ages of 16 and 20 to literature. It's the perfect teething book for those interested in delving into the world of classic western writers. Just by reading the writers Miller mentions in TOC one would have an extremely well-rounded literary diet. Of course the book would be impossible for a 20 year old to understand emotionally, but it's still an excellent starting point.

Rating:
Summary: Dark Edgy Classic
Review: I read this book immediately after another Amazon purchase -- THE LOSERS' CLUB by Richard Perez. That book was set in East Village of the '90s and centered around an unlucky (i.e. "failed") writer addicted to personal ads and also featured a host of bohemian types. While the narrative of THE LOSERS' CLUB is pretty straight-forward. The narrative of TROPIC OF CANCER seems amazingly disjointed. I loved the writing -- there's a brilliantly written line on every page -- but I couldn't help but wonder how much better this book could have been if Henry Miller had a good editor.

That's not to say it isn't a great book. It is. In fact, I read it straight through -- twice ( just as I did with THE LOSERS' CLUB). But I kept seeing ways that it could've been better: tighter and more condensed. Another draft could've helped this book, I think.

THE TROPIC OF CANCER is certainly a haunting book, which of course is what marks a great work of art: it's something that you tend to dwell on after its been experienced. I would certainly recommend this novel to anyone seeking to understand the loneliness and exhilaration of being a creative person. TROPIC OF CANCER therefore makes my top 10 list of greatest books about art and artists.

Rating:
Summary: One of the Twenthy Century's best novels.
Review: In a delightful mixture of memior and fiction, creating the first ever autobiographical novel, Henry Miller tells the story of his first year in Paris, France. It was the turning point in his life when he stopped wanting to be a writer and became one.
He broke all the taboos, by writing about sex using so-called dirty words to describe it. He tried to write about his life as it really was and how he imagined it to be. I love it and have re-read it at least four times now. It is the most honest novel ever written.

Rating:
Summary: The one and only Miller
Review: Tropic of Cancer may be a bit too vulgar for some. It takes your morals, values, and taboos then rightfully tosses them out the window. It is the story of the darker side of life in Frnace. His writing illuminates nightmares, recurring themes of bugs, sex, hunger, vulgarity etc. This may sound terrible but his language is amazing. This novel is 100% original, and his style is unmatched. I give it 5 stars for his descriptive talents and the vividness of the story.