Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Tropic of Cancer
Book Review: A work of parables, forever ahead of it's time
Summary: 5 Stars
I believe that this book will probably never be fully understood and appreciated for what it is, and therefore cannot be completely summarized in a review such as this.
However with that said, this book has the power to change one's perception on life itself.
In my experience, to truly understand Henry Miller, one must first forget nearly everything that has been taught in our modern way of thinking and instilled in every other man, woman and child since the dawn of civilized man, and learn to think freely(which unfortunetly, is no easy task, and will probably remain the reason for this book being misunderstood for many generations to come). The reader must then not focus on the words, which many a time appear to be no more than ramblings, but on the meaning that they hold. Then, and only then, may one realize the ideas that the author is trying to convey in his parables.
I have never read a book with a more profound impact than this one and will continue to always keep at least one copy in my possession.
Book Review: Alla kazam!
Summary: 5 Stars
Honest, brutal, to the point and extremely difficult to read in spots, this paen is nevertheless once of the greatest rants I have ever read. Certain scences are so funny, pathetic and disgusting that you have to laugh out loud. Even if you find some passages un-navigable (i.e. wordy), some scenes hard to digest, Miller will come up with one beautiful sentence that makes it all worthwhile. This book should be put on a spaceship and rocketed off to the far reaches of the cosmos, where it can serve as an ambassador of artistic achievement for alien races.Book Review: Amazing Novel
Summary: 5 Stars
This has to be the greatest novel that I've read in years. Henry Miller effectively blends prose with a poetic style that goes so deep on whatever subject he is writing about. He describes a prostitute's money maker, in such elegant language that you forget about whether its vulgar or not. He has a way of sucking you into his prose that your mind just follows his words on the page and you find yourself getting lost in whatever he has to say no matter how disgusting or mundane the given topic is.
Tropic of Cancer follows Miller's journey as a poor ex-pat, who can still live it up in Paris. His many adventures with friends, rivals, and whores create a realistic picture of that place and time.
Miller can write erotic prose like no one else. Sexual descriptions can go on for pages and pages without getting tedious.
This is an excellent novel for those of us who used to love reading the letters in Penthouse combined with literary genuis.
Book Review: American Values Poetically Rejected in Miller's Neo-Classic
Summary: 4 Stars
Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" is the most un-American book ever written in novel form, of a piece with "On The Road" and "Catcher In The Rye" as stories built for disaffected youth of all ages.It is easy (although still unacceptable) understanding this book's banning from American shores nearly 30 years from its release. It semi-autobiographically describes Miller's vagabond life in 1930s Paris, blasting off from mundane conversations and cold sexual encounters into flying, flowing strands of poetic imagery and useful, if not always agreeable, wisdom glorifying the individual over any semblence of community.
Miller writes of dead-end jobs at a newspaper and boarding school (his entry about his proofreading job should be required reading for would-be newspapermen), fleeting, fleecing relationships with friends and acquaintances (Miller's betrayal at book's end, not only of his friend but of his disdain to material wealth, is revelatory) and the rooms, city, and country he lived in (his descriptions of dark Paris streets and bordellos, their residents and patrons read sensual and grotesque, but hold humanity better than their scribe. His descriptions of New York skyscrapers are intriguing and surreal). His frank conversations among bedmates, liberal use of offensive words for women and minorities would easily fit on an Enimem rap album in 2000; imagine what audiences emerging from the Victorian era must have thought. Miller's sexual descriptions are even today too raw, mean-spirited and selfish to stand even as pornography.
But amid Miller's poetic, not narrative, wordflow (a vivid, hilarious description of a bar fight notwithstanding), "Tropic of Cancer" seems most to rankle vision and values Americans hold as close as their beloved eagle and flag symbols. (No accident that Miller gets evicted from job and living quarters on America's religious holiday, July 4). 40 years before punk's Sex Pistols mocked their countrymen by singing "No future for you!", Miller joyously lived without having or wanting one. His world in "Tropic of Cancer" is without savings, family, hope, history, reverence, or respect. All this in years of the American and world's Great Depression; Miller's famous opening lines "I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive" would cut America's "Greatest Generation," which overcame that Depression, to the quick - had they read them then.
"Tropic of Cancer"'s final, abrupt scenes are inevitable; Miller's friend's wish to leave his girlfriend for home "to hear people speak English again" countered all Miller acted on and wrote about. The end is as wholesome a climax as this most hedonistic story could have achieved, in a book fellow iconoclast Ezra Pound accurately described as "a dirty book worth reading." In other words...Miller's Paris is a nice, if dirty, place to visit in print. Just don't do this at home, kids.
Book Review: An American Surrealistic Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
What does one say about a work of genius, except that one can only hope to come close in your own writing? This books is a piece of surrealistic beauty - surrealistic in the sense Andre Breton talked about when he discussed writing books. We should not be surprised at this, considering the time and place Miller was writing - Paris in the 30's. Surrealism was at it's peak, and Henry Miller was no doubt it's greatest practitioner - at least, in the realm of the novel. It is written in a frenzy, a furry, and yet presents us with a narrator that we would love to know, who we would love to be around and encounter Paris with. It has an intensity from begining to end that is breathtaking, and there are observations of pure genius. I am a lover of surrealism - and am particularly interested in surrealistic theories, but Henry Miller's book is, to my mind, the best pure representation of surrealism out there.