Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Tropic of Cancer
Book Review: A great writer that I just can't stomach.
Summary: 2 Stars
I will not argue the point - Henry Miller is a fantastic writer, more a modern poet than a memoirist or novelist, I believe. His writing is completely unabashed, unbridled, triumpantly violating every taboo. He has the same bombasticness and authoritative voice as someone like Whitman, but if Whitman is life's celebrant, Miller is its misanthrope.
Reading Tropic of Cancer consistently put me in the foulest of moods. What drives this book ultimately is disgust and dissatisfaction, and all of Miller's talk of rot and vomit and stench and decay made my skin crawl. I completely understand why Miller is considered to be at the forefront of modern literature, he obliterates all known writerly conventions with this book. But while reading "Tropic" might be important, it's far, far from pleasant.
Book Review: A jewel in Litereture
Summary: 5 Stars
Reading 'The Tropic of Cancer', as with other of Miller's, is not essentially about a 'story' per-se but about falling in love with literature. I would find myself, mid- through, the book wanting to toss it away; as much he would - at times - annoy me with his never ending sentences and paragraphs ... yet i am glad I did not, becuase through his words one learns a very important lesson:- that to live and joy, despite all the tradegy and comedy of life.Book Review: A masterpiece in madness
Summary: 5 Stars
Miller’s erudite -- yet absurdist -- style reached its climax in this work. It’s perhaps pointless to comment on a book that declares in its first few lines that it is not a book but “a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art”. Indeed, while Miller comments brilliantly on just about every aspect of the human condition, he implies an insult, a ridicule of the structured classic schools of philosophy that pretend to achieve the same.
Read it and experience the insult for yourself.
Book Review: A truly remarkable book, if not always an easy read
Summary: 4 Stars
Henry Miller's controversial TROPIC OF CANCER remains today a remarkable book: a stream-of-consciousness autobiographical novel chronicling Miller's own experiences as a poor starving artist in Paris. And though his experiences vary from bouts of drunkenness to nights spent chasing after sex to the occasional insight into life in general, his prose veers from the mundane to the poetic, with almost nothing in between. As the Amazon.com editorial review suggests, it truly is a remarkable literary work of self-confession, and Miller's mercurial prose remains amazing to read all the way 'til the end.
As I found this a mostly fascinating read, I won't go so far as to call this "overrated," like a lot of people my age (18) are tempted to do with a lot of much-acclaimed literary classics. I would be lying, though, if I didn't admit that I occasionally found its plotlessness rather wearying, and that I found Miller's lapses into floridity in his prose slightly irritating. Sometimes the prose, when he is feeling more poetically expansive, simply descends into unintelligibility---what is he talking about through all those fancy metaphors anyway? (The first few pages of the book suffer in this respect.) As for its lack of a real dramatic structure...well, it is obvious that that was hardly a concern for Miller, who I think is aiming for something different from the usual beginning, middle, and end here. TROPIC OF CANCER is, above all, about Miller's openness to different experiences, and I think it is that theme that binds together all the anecdotes Miller writes. By using this stream-of-consciousness style, he similarly opens the reader up to his own experiences, his own thoughts and feelings. It gives his prose an immensely compelling "live" feel to it: the reader feels as if he is experiencing Miller's nocturnal adventures and thought processes at the same time he himself does, so masterful he is in his prose in creating an authentic sense of place. And by the end of the novel, Miller himself has found a measure of satisfaction from his existence that he has been seeking out (however unconsciously) throughout the novel: he has achieved his personal "flow."
TROPIC OF CANCER is not always easy to read (especially with characters that don't elicit easy sympathy, particularly with their attitude towards women), but it remains a remarkable book nevertheless. If you don't always warm to everything Miller writes (or how he writes it), at least you will never ever feel that this is anything other than a very personal statement from a literary man who had a genuinely original perspective on things. TROPIC OF CANCER is the kind of work that is easy to admire, harder to love. Don't let that put you off, though, from getting into a one-of-a-kind literary experience. Recommended.
Book Review: A very necessary evil
Summary: 5 Stars
Pehaps four point five stars would better suit Miller's most famous work, in that despite its manifest genius and filthy eloquence, a definite disjointedness pervades the work, and to good measure, because as Miller points out from the outset, Tropic of Cancer is "not a book" whatsoever, but rather a dirty, unabashed diatribe against art's self-imposed confinements, as well as our ingrained Western Puritanism.
The novel's Voice need not be discussed at great length, because it is so obviously unparalleled. Prior to reading this novel I thought that no artist was willing to document, with any semblance of honesty, the overt perversity of the young male mind, which is so often obfuscated in literature for whatever paltry reason. I was also taken aback by the seemingly breakneck manner in which the book is paced, everything seeming to happen at once, a timeframe more or less obscured by the strange spate of things that comes into and falls out of the protagonist's mind. Miller has given us a rather simple plot concept, every grotesque detail illuminated, and how many modern authors are indebted to that technique? Kerouac resonates with the exuberance and hyperbole of Miller's work, and Ginsberg's frankness seems precedented here and only here, in the lurid depths of "Tropic". There is additionally a lot of philosophical rambling, to be sure, but not necessarily in the Camus vain or anything of the sort. Conceptually, Miller seems more to mirror the brash American philosophy of, say, the nocturnal Hemingway, and certainly Eliot, as the novel expressly focuses on the fundamental chaotic nature of time and existence and the apparent perversity of Western civilization, manifested in Miller's Paris, at times Wasteland-ish and terrifying. There is also a Proletarian undertone throughout, a kind of immediate celebration of the Parisian dregs, the prostituted underclass living and dying on the streets alongside the destitute protagonist.
Most importantly, the novel seems to belong in the ambiguous "meta-fiction" genre at times, as it concerns itself so fundamentally with the medium at hand, the past works of literary merit, Miller's "Bible" notion, the protagonists thoughts on the writing of more books, etc. etc.
However the most blisteringly cathartic thing in the novel, the thing which seems to wipe clean all former attempts at recording truth, is that fact that Miller aptly balances his philosophical meanderings with the hard immediacy of life on the street, the sad, sick truths of hygeine, sex, and nutrition that are so inescapable. After all, how can one suppose that existential quandries are any more important, in the here and now, than an outbreak of lice, a sudden libidinous inflamation (as a less candid writer might term it), or the use of a water closet?
I can certainly see why the casual reader might consider the novel offputting, even unreadable, and to each his own. I don't particularly like when a person comments on a prior review, but I'll do it here nonetheless: I thought the reviewer who acknowledged the book's merit but but was ultimately displeased with it as a whole was very gracious, and his reaction is probably a common one. The novel is so tremendously stark, it seems like a miasmal abyss sometimes, and one quickly realizes that there's only one direction in an abyss, a notion that Miller humbly validates. Perhaps its an issue of demographics: I myself am a young white male, conflicted in much the same manner as Miller's protagonist, and therefor its terribly refreshing to see the kind of subject matter that the novel concerns itself with. Perhaps the novel cannot provide the same solace for a middle aged man, an old woman, or a teenage girl, that it did for me, but such is life. It's a sad affair, but as Kafka said, we need books that affect us like disaster.