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Loading... Tròpic de Càncer (original 1934; edition 1990)by Henry Miller, Jordi Arbonès i Montull (Translator)
Work InformationTropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934)
  
Favourite Books (214) » 33 more 20th Century Literature (256) 1,001 BYMRBYD Concensus (220) 1930s (68) Unread books (362) French Books (68) Banned Books Week 2014 (178) Erotic Fiction (8) to get (19) banned books (1) sexuality (2) No current Talk conversations about this book.  mns1 | Dec 23, 2024 |    ) iamnader | Jul 6, 2024 |  ) denmoir | Apr 27, 2024 | ) snash | Mar 18, 2024 | The novel takes place in Paris, there is this young artist, his group of friends and a lot of women. A lot of women and a lot of sex, which was just so boring! No real story, nothing moving or funny or dramatic - lots of complaining and lots of sex. I have absolutely no idea why so many people enjoy this book - I didn't and I'm very happy to remove this book from my bookshelf. I'm not going to read any other book by this author. (  ) Donderowicz | Mar 12, 2024 |
 How shocking Tropic of Cancer was when I got hold of a smuggled copy in the late thirties; how merely charming it is now, redolent of a Paris in which the coffee and Gauloises were alike more aromatic than they’ve been since the war, a genuine vie de bohème, the physical act of love as fresh as if the French had just invented it. Miller unbuttoned the fly and tore open the placket with a fiercer gust than Lawrence (who was still mother’s boy) or Joyce (who let language get in the way). Today’s naked generation has learned nearly everything from him – everything, that is to say, except his bookishness, his capacity for recapturing innocence, his sense of wonder, his sense of words. What Cancer uniquely possesses is a coherent, animating vision of life—one that justifies the book's disjunctions of form, binds together its stark literalism and its reverie, and spares Miller's adventures the drabness of mere anecdote. The vision is of manic nihilism, of hunger for experience combined with scorn for the cowardly, illusion-drugged human race, which has to dream of miracles while "all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off." Miller has given up on value—and, along with it, any obligation to steel his narrative manner against the ironic fates or to tease meaning from the world with modernist devices of myth and symbol. He is simply talking, much as he will talk through thousands of subsequent pages, but with the difference that here the talk is an act of liberation, a registering of the discovery that no care need be taken to seek order, make discriminations, or check one's impulses. "If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself." Tropic of Cancer is a good piece of writing; and it has also a sort of historical importance. It is the epitaph for the whole generation of American writers and artists that migrated to Paris after the war... It has frequently been characteristic of the American writers in Paris that they have treated pretentious subjects with incompetent style and sordid feeling. Mr. Miller has done the opposite: he has treated an ignoble subject with a sure hand at color and rhythm. He is not self-conscious and not amateurish. And he has somehow managed to be low without being really sordid.  Twenty-eight years have gone by since Tropic of Cancer was first published. Since then its form has become the most fashionable in modern literature. We are being overwhelmed in a pandemic of récits — especially French ones... There is only one trouble with all this stuff. It is soaked in unfathomable solemnity and pompous rhetoric. In all Genêt or Kerouac there is nothing to compare with Miller’s Hindu and the bidet, or the Imaginary Rich Girl. I’m sorry. I just don’t believe Henry when he expands and augments Count Keyserling, or recommends a Dream Book, or worries at breakfast over the astrology column in the morning paper. He’s having us all on — maybe himself included — but behind the deep thoughts from Bughouse Square, there is always, however faint, the steady rumble of low-down mockery. Henry Miller—probably the funniest American writer since Mark Twain... is the closest an American has come to Rabelais... Tropic of Cancer had a liberating spirit, because it seemed totally without hypocrisy... Miller sees friends in terms of the possible meal or bed he can cadge from them, women in terms of their sexual possibilities. Miller seems to bring us closer to "reality," seems to bring art closer to truth. But when we're reading him we don't think of his sexual hyperbole as objective description; we don't assume, for example, that all the women Miller meets are sexy sluts visibly painting for what he can give them... The hero is amazing because he takes such joy in the diversity of possible pleasures; one imagines him as a mild little man with all-embracing tastes, a man eager to try whatever he can get, being excited by even the most unlikely ladies... Miller, one of the great characters in American literature—Huck Finn as a starving expatriate—is... a joyful coward who will always sneak away rather than face an unpleasant scene. Belongs to SeriesTropic Series (1) Belongs to Publisher SeriesBiblioteca Folha (8) Colecção Mil Folhas (52) — 13 more Is contained inHas the adaptationInspiredHas as a studyHas as a supplementAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
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 the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. No library descriptions found. 
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.52Literature American literature in English American fiction in English 1900-1999 1900-1945LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.62)
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Wikipedia in English (2)
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Anyway, there is no better commentary on Miller's book than Orwells' essay and the essay is marked by illuminating and unexpected insight. Orwell, in his usual fairminded way, strives to understand the book in the context of the War and it's long prelude in Europe. He tries to understand how Miller could have been so completely disengaged from wider contemporary developments and remain so wholly immersed in the lascivious and dissolute hedonism which characterises the novel.
Tropic Of Cancer and Inside The Whale remain essential reading. (