Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Tropic of Cancer
Book Review: tropic was not death
Summary: 5 Stars
patrick indigo, death of a salesman was not written by henry miller, but was written by arthur miller. double check your sources before you post.Book Review: what a long strange strip in gay paree...
Summary: 3 Stars
three and a half stars... i admit. i read this book simply because of its reputation. but by the time i finished it. i realized it wasn't all that it was hyped up to be. sure, miller lived like a vagabond in paris, hustled, starved, ate , drank, had sex with plenty of prostitutes. i'm sure they'll be quite a few people who'll read this book and think his life was all that. i would love to see paris eventually. when i went to europe last year, my only regret was that i didn't see it, but i plan to see it, hopefully later this year.back to the review...
this book drags in places. sometimes,the squalor and debauchery gets to be too much.i'm no saint,i have been known to drank like a fish from time to time and toke when i feel like it. but i'm beginning to wonder if drugs do actually make a writer better? some parts of this book, like for instance, when he describes a woman's "nightflower " [...] i admit turned me on ! however, the scene with the guy falling down the elevator shaft turned my stomach...i'm not saying that i want to be rich. but i don't think many people want to live the type of life miller did that made him a madman, especially me...the anti-semitism also disturbed me somewhat, but no doubt, this dude was passionate about his art and his word craft is worthy of three and a half stars.[....]this book has managed to stay successful only because of the controversy that preceded it. it's worth a read...but it wont change your life...
Book Review: worth reading, but highly overrated and mostly dull
Summary: 2 Stars
this so called 'classic' work of henry miller's is extremely overrated, and as i was reading it i noticed that i had to force myself to concentrate numerous times. when people rave about how great it is and how trailblazing it was, i wonder if they read they same book i did, or if i'm living in a parallel universe of some kind. the only redeeming quality i found in it is miller's genuine rebelliousness and anarchic nature, although at times even this got a little tiresome and monotonous. the sex scenes are no longer shocking or thrilling, only annoying and at times unpleasant to read, because miller is so misogynistic and chauvinistic. the problem with all of his work, although some of it has undeniable value if only as a literature of revolt, is that he tries to be too many things at once and it comes off looking phony and contrived. for example, from reading "time of the assassins" you would think that miller was a rimbaudian/poetic outcast his whole life, and he goes on and on about how striking the similarity is between himself and rimbaud. (i, for one, felt like saying "don't flatter yourself, dude"). then read a collection of his essays, and he'll babble about how all of his friends loved him, and how he was just one of the guys. any close reading of his work makes it apparent that he was simply an arrogant narcissist with a ridiculously inflated view of himself. it's fine to think highly of yourself, but past a point it becomes simply delusional, as it clearly did with miller. he thinks that during his lifetime he grasped every experiential truth life had to offer because screwed women of all kinds every which way he could, and yet his capacity to translate it into the abstract with style is nothing to write home about. every other paragraph you'll find poor old henry trying gallantly to communicate the meaning of life, and then three paragraphs later he'll say (as he did in "the wisdom of the heart") that "life needs to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning." all great men are contradictory and this does not take away from their value or importance one bit, but the problem is that in miller's case he was not a great man at all, and so his endless contradictions and oxymorons only serve to take away from the small value that his books had in the first place. i share his hatred of authority and established values and share his love for the surrealist/modernist rebellion against literature, but i guess i'm classicist enough to expect even the most nihilistic and revolutionary author to have just a tiny bit of talent. read his work for the admittedly refreshing anti traditionalism and astute critique of conventional morality, but do not buy into the hype.Book Review: wowzers
Summary: 5 Stars
A gorgeous, daring, revelatory book. Miller was a writer well ahead of his time.Book Review: yes you should read it!
Summary: 5 Stars
When a person reads Henry Miller, they are drawn into a world where personality and desire clash directly with social acceptance and morality. You are privy to his innermost thoughts, you see the world through his eyes, and you come away having lived a different life in the span of a couple hundred pages. He does not so much tell a story as invite you to live. His words are power, he uses images and concepts to awake the reader, to jolt the reader, and to encourage the reader. The resulting effect is to be forever changed by the words, which is the mark of a true writer. He invites you, through his style and his passion, to join him in the act of writing, to through off the preconcived notions of what a writer should be, and take up a pen, throw ink at a page, and revel in the act of writing itself. Because of his passion, because of his power, he becomes a mentor to a struggling writer, merely through the baring of his own soul. I also recommend the movie Henry & June.