- ISBN13: 9780802131782
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
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… More >>
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I know of no other writer who makes words truly live like Henry Miller does. “Cancer” is his best (although the neglected “Colossus of Maroussi” runs a close second), full of enthusiasm, rampant lust-driven adventures, a man living though it rain crocodiles, a visionary portrait of a person determined to live in this cracked and dying earth that will drag you down and suffocate you if you let it. Living has nothing to do with money. It has nothing to do with prestige, nothing to do with a career, with laws or codes or good sense. It has everything to do with sex, with art and inspiration, with creativity and the fire at our heels, the hunger that gnaws us from the inside out. My friends and I had a joke: “What happened in the bidet?” “Read the book!” Unfortunately I think they only knew because I told them. I carried this book around, and his others, for months, enraptured, exhuasted, tormented, joyous, breathless, during a very bleak period of my life. He kept my imagination alive. The first time I tried to read it, just after the 1990 film “Henry & June” I didn’t get it. About a year or so later I tried again, and ate it up. It was like I had a tropic of cancer-sized hole in my head and I’d finally found the missing piece. No other book, except maybe “Naked Lunch,” has made me realize that literature IS life, that my heart could be enlarged by one, that reading and writing weren’t just hobbies or exercises–they were raw and painful necessities, as vital as breath, as flesh, as rousing and invigorating as sex at 3am that lasts til dawn. I love all kinds of writers, but I have to admit, I’m kind of a snob. To me, the real writer is one like Henry Miller, like Rimbaud, like Poe, the ones who live at the fringes of madness, who in poverty and tatters show us that it’s life, and life only.
Rating: 5 / 5
…my spiritual liberation started with Henry Miller and _Tropic of Cancer_.
I always credit him with “saving my life” and don’t think this an exaggeration. As a troubled, near suicidal 15 year old, I saw _Tropic of Cancer_ on the bookshelf of my next door neighbor’s – whose dog I was walking while they were away – and dove in hoping to find what reports of the obscenity trial in the New York Times would lead me to find – I was 15 and anxious for “obscenity”.
No doubt, I found obscenity, but mostly I found courage! gobs of it – and joy – the courage to be who I was and just go for it – everything and everyone else be damned!
For the next decade or so, not two weeks would go buy when I wasn’t reading Miller: the Topics, Black Spring, Sexus/Nexus/Plexus, The Colossus of Maroussi, Big Sur, and on and on, re-reading – but although they all recharged the joy (not to mention my vocabulary, he read the dictionary as a youth and remembered everything), nothing matched the impact of _Tropic of Cancer_.
Yes – Miller’s pretentious, narcissistic and misogynistic, but he’s also filled with a contagious spirit. His later works – particularly _Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch_ are more focused on true spirituality. By his late 50’s he finally got the sexual obsession and misogyny under control, the earlier works are too focused on lust.
Great stuff for a 15 year old boy though! – wonderful and graphic sex scenes are interspersed with lyricism, erudition and the great joy of being alive …no matter what…
I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this to any 15 year old or 50 year old…
Rating: 5 / 5
The back cover of Henry Miller’s novel “Tropic of Cancer” notes that the book was first published in Paris in 1934, but banned as obscene in the United States for 27 years until a historic court ruling was made. Thus, “Tropic of Cancer” is significant as a historical artifact in addition to being a literary work of art. The book tells the story of an American writer named Henry Miller who lives in Paris. Henry definitely lives in the seedy underbelly of the city; the book follows him to the bars, cafes, and whorehouses and details his encounters with a number of colorful characters.
“Tropic of Cancer” opens on a grungy note as the narrator discusses the lice infestation of his friend’s armpits. Early on the narrator promises that this will not be a polite book: “This is libel, slander, defamation of character [...] a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art.” Miller largely succeeds to deliver on this promise. The book is full of profanity, and there are frank discussions of sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and other such topics.
The book has a crude charm and energy throughout, even though at times the prose seems wildly self-indulgent. Miller depicts Paris as a magical place, a pilgrimage site for artists and wanderers. The narrator often reflects on writing and literature in general, and on his own artistic goals and theories in particular. There is also reflection on America and American identity. Miller’s prose sometimes attains a Whitmanesque revelatory quality.
To me the main question about this book is thus: Is it merely an important historic artifact, or does it still sing as a work of living literature? My own reply to this question: the book does still sing, delivering (to quote the book itself) “bloated pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement.” If you like it, also check out the writing of Charles Bukowski.
Rating: 4 / 5
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.
Rating: 4 / 5
Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” is easily one of the best books written by any American author in this century. Written with a refreshing honesty and a realistic outlook, “Tropic of Cancer” is a fine example of the autobiographical-novel form (so autobiographical that Miller says its not really a book at all and that he is referred to as Henry Miller in the book).
It is sad to realize that this book was banned from 1934, when it was published, to 1961, when it finally got published in America (although the legal battles did not end unitl 1963). For nearly thirty years Americans were denied this fabulous book, and it makes me wonder why this was allowed to happen. But perhaps all the hoopla got more people interested in the book and therefore helped the exposure of it.
What more is there to say? “Tropic of Cancer” is an outstanding work and I personally will be reading more of Miller’s books very soon.
Rating: 5 / 5