Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (PDF)

Description

Henry Miller’s famously banned book is “a matter-of-fact celebration of chucking one’s dreary life and following your heart to Paris” (Richard Price). Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller’s famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, “one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century.”

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I understand and respect the influence Miller had on later writers particularly Kerouac and Nin, but Miller’s style and his willingness to bore readers with tales of himself are not of themselves good or even interesting. Miller’s impact on later writers may be likened to the impact of WWI on WWII. The influence is a fact but it does not follow that it is necessarily a good thing.Kerouac’s writing worked because he was exceptionally bright, had a good command of the English language, was a perceptive and sensitive observer of the human condition and was concerned with things other than himself and his bodily functions. Miler is far less talented, significantly less aware of the world around him, a poor observer of others, obsessed about his own physical needs and completely unconcerned with others. Thus while reading Kerouac can be a delight, reading Miller is a bore. Miller’s alleged literary skill is rarely on display in his works and largely absent from this book. He is simply inept at writing dialogue and any attempt to put Miller in the same class as writers such as Hemingway is a bad joke. Miller’s writing was not formed by exceptional talent but by shortcuts needed as a result of his inadequacies as a writer. You will find the occasional good turn of phrase but you will more often find poorly conceived attempts such as the following:”That was enough for me. I turned at once to Marcelle and began to flatter the ass off her. we stood at the corner of the bar, pretending to dance, and mauled each other voraciously. Jimmie gave me a big horse-wink and nodded his head approvingly. She was a lascivious bitch, this Marcelle and pleasant at the same time.”This is good writing? No, it is not. If Miller were alive today he would likely be writing Penthouse letters, with the same or less skill as others. If you took excerpts of Miler’s writing and submitted them as your own for criticism they would be rightly blasted, yet when Miller’s authorship is attributed to them they become gems? No, they do not. Literary snobbery is as responsible for Miller’s reputation as anything else. He became popular in the literary world because he tried some new things (to cover his poor writing skills), because of his sexual meanderings, and because he was banned. Had he never been banned, he likely would have descended to his correct role in the literary world.Miller possessed an impoverished vocabulary of dirty words. The B word, C word and F word are used incessantly, repetitively and rarely to good purpose. His knowledge of sex was amateurish, his writing about sex was juvenile. He was not a sexual man, just a horny man. If you want good erotic writing from someone who was a sexual person, read Nin. Miller’s much noted sexual passages are uninteresting, superficial and quite simply boring. Yes, I understand he blazed a trail and without Miller we might not have had the far superior writings of Nin, but it is nonetheless no reason to read Miller, unless you are an academic who is studying literary history. If not, read Nin. Read Kerouac.Was Tropic of Cancer important in the literary world? Yes. Was it good? No. For some reason literary critics seem incapable of distinguishing between these two concepts.I and many others also do not care for Miller’s writing in large because we have no interest in or respect for him as a man, and his writing is, if nothing else, about himself. I cannot imagine going to dinner with him. His world revolved around himself to the exclusion of any concern about others. His politics were immature, poorly formed and almost childish, much as were his attitudes toward women.Miler did at least exhibit some honesty and show some self awareness when he wrote “Life, said Emerson, consists in what a man is thinking all day. If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine.”

⭐Have you ever read something that you didn’t really know too much about but had always assumed it must somehow live up to its reputation? Then as you begin to get into it, you realize it is not at all what you expected and you wonder why it is even heralded and at that point you aren’t sure whether you wanted to continue reading. But then a turn of phrase, a well positioned idea, a feeling that the author has captured exactly the way you feel overcomes you and everything begins to fall into place. That is my experience with Tropic of Cancer. I must say that I have never highlighted so many phrases, paragraphs, PAGES in any other book I have read. You owe it to yourself to read this book.

⭐Stylistically reminded me of William S. Burroughs, though written long before him. Amazing use of language, yet very misogynistic by today’s standards, especially in the repeated use of one particular expletive as a term for women. In Miller’s Paris, all women are prostitutes and expendable, it seems. Nevertheless, has there ever been a more relentless depiction of hunger and poverty in literature?Much of the “obscenity” that got this book banned for so many years is pretty humdrum by today’s standards, but only because books like this led the way to the literary freedom we have today. At times bewildering, at other times darkly humorous, this is a peculiar book, but still certainly a landmark of sorts in the history of literature.

⭐Wow! What a controversial book. I can see why it was banned and why so many opinions are polarized in the ratings. First of all, I have to warn anyone who is thinking about reading this that there is a lot of crude language and blatant description of sex. That didn’t bother me. What I did have trouble with was the misogynistic attitude of the main character, who often simply refers to women using the C word and treats them as objects rather than human beings.That said, the author is writing about a misogynistic individual living in Paris during the depression and he does it with rawness and some beautifully written passages. Anyone reading this book needs to bear in mind that our culture is very different now. I think that reading this with a group who has a knowledgeable leader or using a reading guide is your best bet if you really want to get something out of it. There’s a lot of meat to this book – if you can get underneath the layer of crudeness. It’s a stream of consciousness piece about life and what it truly means to be happy, and the author shows us that it doesn’t necessarily involve being wealthy.Who should read this: Fans of authors such as Bukowski and Hemingway.Who should not read this: Anyone who is squeamish or easily offended.

⭐What is there to say about this book that hasn’t already been said before? It’s a classic. It’s insightful, funny, dark, titillating, boring at times, optimistic, opinionated, timeless. Just get it.

⭐Classic book.

⭐Heard about it for years, read out of curiosity.

⭐As requested

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