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Summary: Power, Passion and Love
Review: Most contemporary Western people are miserable despite the appearance of great privilage. They lack vitality and will. Ths novel presents an ideal man on a quest to experience life at its fullest. Nothing stands in his way. Not conventional morality, logic, fear or shame. Exile, poverty and loneliness are presented here as pathetic, defeated enemies to be mocked. The strong, passionate soul is already a king. Every experience is a door to the transcendent for Miller's autobiographical hero. Others weep and suffer--he celebrates amid the gloom of decaying 30s Paris. Miller's protagonist is the modern eqivalent of a Zen or Sufi master. Paradise is where you find it. God is where you choose to manifest Him.
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Summary: Pontifications of a Frustrated Artist
Review: Miller's wild ramblings and ribald tales of his life in Paris is a unique masterpiece. The book contains no plot and is a self portrait of the artist himself.One can understand why 'Tropic of Cancer' was banned in the US for over 30 years. Modern writers owe Miller a debt of graditude for easing the threats of censorship. Miller's passionate diatribes are pure poetry and definitely influenced by the man he most admires, Walt Whitman. For those purists who require that a novel have a defined plot, you will not like 'Tropic of Cancer' but for those who appreciate the artistry of the written word, have fun.
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Summary: Tropic of Cancer
Review: I wonder if I read the same book as the people who suggest this book tells us how to live and experience exhilaration. I notice most of these positive reviews come from men. One review even suggested that pretentious intellectuals are reduced to schoolboys when reading Miller's novel; clearly, this reviewer believes all intellectuals are male. While Miller's novel is exciting and wild as it tells of a life that transgresses social codes, I cannot imagine wanting to know the narrator or anyone like him. He is a leech who requires others to follow the social codes so that he may feed off of them. The narrator refuses to examine his own assumptions and the way these shape his behavior and attitudes. I think this book may only be redemptive if the author is distanced from the narrator to a degree. I wonder if the point of the novel is to question how far removed the narrator actually is from social norms. I don't think it's very far, and I think this is where the greatness of the book potentially lies. Instead of being a commentary on the way we ought to live freely, the novel seems to be a description of how bounded we are by cultural constructions that shape our perceptions and our behavior--no matter how we try to escape. The narrator's outrageous behavior and attitudes, then, are intensified images of societal norms rather than examples of living outside a social code. I do believe that social codes often need to be challenged. I do not, however, think Miller's narrator presents much of a challenge because he appears so blind to his own complicity with these codes. He is certainly not the role model that some readers/reviewers present him as!
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Summary: Fecundating....
Review: Take this and read it, for this is the book of everlasting life. "Tropic of Cancer," Miller's first work (next to the unfinished Horatio Alger, of course), is a beautiful book about a man without money, without shame, without scruples, and without a reason to feel the slightest bit upset. Go with him. Taste wine and bread. Sleep with women. Feel the rain on your face. Scrimp and save. Wander the streets and fill the brothels of a destitute Paris, the parks filled with crumbling statues, the dawn of the "metallurgical day." This is the last book ever written, the final slamming shut, the baton pass from the Romantics to the Moderns, graceful, vibrant, not in the least bit obscene. (Nothing so marvelously free deserves such a branding!) Read this book and breathe again.
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Summary: Tough read.
Review: I enjoyed this book as I do most of the classics.... but I have to admit it wasn't a free flowing read. Miller at times tries to impress everyone with his extended vocabulary, most of which unfortunately is outdated. Not many dialogs between characters but very descriptive. The book is almost like a diary of his time spent in France. Miller describes his free existence going from job to job with no money (meeting) many women and throwing back enough whisky to kill a small horse as a better life then most rich people. His usages of honesty by speaking his mind without restraints throughout this novel really give the reader insight to Miller under his protective barrier. I found that the book also contained many comments or passages written in french. I couldn't interpret these lines and I hope that I didn't miss out on key issues. I recommend not reading this book in short sittings.
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Summary: Savor it, read it again, soak it in!
Review: I had some doubts about reading "Tropic of Cancer," since my only other exposure to Henry Miller was from reading "Under the Roofs of Paris." ("Under the Roofs" has some pretty bizarre sexual situations that even I found offensive!) But "Tropic of Cancer" gives the reader a portrait of a man who loves life despite -- or maybe because of -- adverse circumstances. Miller has a keen eye, sharp wit, and an uncanny ability to find the philosophical in the mundane, and the mundane in the philosophical. I would have given this book five stars, except that Miller constantly uses a crude word for the female anatomy to refer to women -- especially those he and his friends sleep with. Strange that someone who is otherwise so forward thinking tends to objectify women.
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Summary: Soulful and sincere
Review: Hailed by the "permissive" generation of the sixties as a prophet of sexual liberation, Henry Miller produced a work that is lyrical, impressively erudite, extremely funny and most of all, soulful and passionately sincere. It ranks as one of the finest modernist works, alongside the works of Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Lawrence; a worthy heir of Whitman and Thoreau, Miller, with his anarchism, his defiance of oppression and his regarding the passions as sacred, has a power to make language live by itself in his glittering images and brilliant soliloquies. He dives into the flux of his times and mines the wealth which is lived experince, transfiguring it into art and purpose. A masterpiece.
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Summary: Moving tale of depression and humanity
Review: A reactionary text, esp. the first paragraph. Arguably overrated due to the court case citing the obscenity of the text, later to be overruled, still a text which depict's man at his most desperate, and possibly at his most content. Read this and think of the materialistic nature you exhibit and how unhappy you are as a result.
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Summary: If only everyone were as honest as Miller....
Review: This was the first book that I read by Miller and it changed the way that I looked at literature forever. It is uncanny how he can seem to always use the best words to describe his adventures in Paris, making an average story enchanting that would be boring being told by anyone else. Beutifully written as if it is one big poem, which makes up for the complete lack of structure. I personaly hate structure anyway. To sum it all up: The best book I have ever read.
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Summary: An infamous masterpiece!
Review: 40 years before Henry Miller had "Tropic of Cancer" published, Knut Hamsun wrote "Hunger" and "Mysteries", where the stream of consciousness was first on display in novels - with the outsider on the edge of life and death, where the blood is whispering and bone-pipes praying. Henry Miller, an open-minded American intellectual went to Paris in the pursuit of - - life - - wanting to feel alive, and to tell the whole world about it. He ended up in the gutter of that very alive city, occasionally coming up to breathe in what was upper class or only bourgeois. At the same time he found comfort in the books of authors like Dostoevsky, Strindberg and Hamsun, whom he compared to Mozart, and about "Mysteries" he later said: "No book stands closer to me. It prevented me from killing myself." (He read it a dozen times.) Parallels can be drawn between classics like "Mysteries" - "Ulysses" - "Tropic of Cancer" - even to "Catcher in the Rye". Displays of genuine feelings, dry wit, rage and disillusionment and then sudden lyrical beauty. "Tropic of Cancer" portrays dirt and lowlife, primitive lust and diseases, the diseases of the individual and of mankind, but at the same time Miller never totally loses a sense of beauty. This is a book packed with incredible descriptions of his life in the 1930s Paris, and even when delirium turns into surrealistic joyrides he is still nothing less than brilliant. This is quite a different Paris from that of Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's. They might also have had their struggles, but their experiences were still different from that of Henry Miller's lice, bedbugs, cockroaches and tapeworms. And still Henry Miller could find comfort in the struggling idols before him. One place in the book he describes how he went to see where and how Strindberg lived during his time in the same city, just to show himself that it was possible to sink even deeper... The prose in parts of the book is astonishing, and despite all who have loathed the book, most of all because of the direct and coarse language with descriptions that can make a wharfie blush, it has been praised by the likes of T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, John dos Passos, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett and George Orwell. Orwell wrote a brilliant essay on "Tropic of Cancer" called "Inside the Whale", a very thorough critical review of the book, given by the author who himself wrote "Down and Out in Paris and London". "Tropic of Cancer" is indeed a very good book that any prudish heart, with a sense for good literature, should allow him/herself to be impressed by. It stands alone in its own place in literature, where nobody (including Henry Miller) has been since.
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