Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Tropic of Cancer
Book Review: Exhilarating!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an amazing book. Miller is funny, erotic, obscene, and philosophical in all the right ways. Read him and get a glimpse of life's real possibilities. This Great American Bum is the real founder of the International Revolution. I don't think anyone can walk away from Miller's Tropic of Cancer the same person as when they arrived. Would Kerouac's "On The Road" have been possible before this book? Or Cain's "The Wards of St. Dymphna"? I don't think so!Book Review: Fecundating....
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: Filthy Stream of Consciousness
Summary: 2 Stars
Tropic of Cancer is the latest in my effort to upgrade my reading list. Rated 50th on the Modern Library list of 100 Best Novels, this work was widely banned upon its publication in 1934. Upon learning this, I was not overly impressed. After all, how dirty did a novel have to be in order to be banned in 1934?
This book is absolutely filthy! Not 1934 filthy; I'm talking 2009 filthy. Not filthy only in a sexual sense, but filthy in virtually every conceivable sense. Excrement, disease, lice, bedbugs, blood stained dirty sheets, and yes, extremely graphic sex. Some may also be offended by the author's penchant for referring to almost all females as c**ts.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not easily offended and I enjoy a good dirty book. My problems with this book have absolutely nothing to do with the filth or the political incorrectness. In fact, the filth was a welcome diversion. My problem is the fact that there is no story here. The book consists of random musings by a dirt poor, American expatriate whose daily life consists of finding a place to lay his head, finding enough food to survive and dedicating essentially all of his meager income on pox ridden prostitutes. Much of these musings are stream of consciousness in nature and mind numbing in their ability to induce sleep.
I very nearly gave up on the book around page 50. Either the action picked up at that point or I became more comfortable with the author's style. In any event, the prose became at least tolerable and at times, even amusing. I certainly acknowledge the possibility that I'm simply not philosophical or "artistic" enough to appreciate the work. It is definitely aiming for a target audience of which I am not a member.
Book Review: Fountain of youth
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm hoping Oprah will make this her next Book Club selection - if she thinks Dr. Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth is revivifying amid the sterility of modern life, she hasn't seen anything yet. Tropic of Cancer is nothing less than a bilgistic piece of ecstatic optimism. It comes as an electric shock when read in the context of the last century's deadening, pessimistic literature or in the context of our (generally) syrupy, self-conscious contemporary literature - or just in the context of day to day life as it has come to be practiced. And while most of the book seems satisfied with getting some mischievous laughs at the expense of Modern Civilization, the last 100 pages or so sustain a level of intensity that can stand beside anything written in English.Book Review: GET THIS MAN TO A CHURCH
Summary: 5 Stars
Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" was a biographical novel of his years as an ex-pat in Paris. It includes tremendously creative, wonderful writing, but in the light of retrospection much of it is reduced to gratuitous pornography. When it was written in the 1930s, Miller's graphic sexual content was considered avant-garde, shocking and artistic. It was banned for this reason until 1961. This was the best thing that could have happened to Miller and the book, creating a cause celebre. But reading it in 2004, it is rather incoherent and, if it came out today, it would not hold up to scrutiny the way Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe stand the test of time. Miller's "cancer" appears to be a cancer of the soul. His descriptions of Parisian life in the 1930s - the whore houses, the scum, the thieves, liars and morally corrupt - describe an eating away of goodness, the way real cancer eats away at bone, skin and body. Reading Miller, one wants to shout, "Get this man to a church." Liberals would excoriate this sentiment as judgment, which of course has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the one thing that could have saved Miller from his moral atrophy is and always will be the Lord Jesus Christ! STEVEN TRAVERS
AUTHOR OF "BARRY BONDS: BASEBALL'S SUPERMAN"
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