|
Loading... Tropic of Cancer (1934)by Henry Miller
  
Favourite Books (202) » 27 more 20th Century Literature (303) Unread books (345) Banned Books Week 2014 (178) Erotic Fiction (6) 1,001 BYMRBYD Concensus (254) to get (19) Europe (354) I Can't Finish This Book (129) French Books (68) No current Talk conversations about this book. I only read this book because of Miller's association with Anais Nin and having heard the controversy about it pretty much my entire life. I gave it a 4 star simply for how honest I felt it was about all the artistic (and wannabe artistic) ex-pats in Paris of the time and their interactions with the underground literati and darker corners and experimentation of living outside the "box." Also the 4 star because the classics in all genres should be read. Nin was a far better writer in my opinion and didn't drone on. Miller was a man of his time so I tried to read with an open mind. He tries to write like he's free of bourgeois society but he's conscious of it and thumbing his nose at in one way or another constantly so I scent a great deal of narcissism in his writing and very little sensuality for the love of actual sensuality and eroticism. It's like a lab experiment and he's imagining himself as Victor Frankenstein. (  ) LuArcher | Jan 19, 2021 |  I don't get it, this book is so-so at best. Like "On the Road" this book is about a down and out guy who mooches his way through life. Ground breaking because he wrote this in the 30's ok. I can see why it was banned then, yet the story itself is not that great. Other than that it is unimpressive garbage. I didn't like the way Miller use French without interpreting it for us. So if you read it do it on a device that allows you to highlight and translate those sentences for you. (  ) foof2you | Dec 21, 2020 | Publicado por primera vez en París en 1934, debido a la censura no vió la luz en Estados Unidos hasta 1961, después de más de sesenta juicios. Considerada por la parte de la crítica como la mejor de sus obras, en su primera novela se sitúa Miller en la estela de Walt Whitman y Thoreau para crea un monólogo en el que el autor hace un inolvidable repaso de sus estancia en París en los primeros años de la década de 1930, centrada tanto en sus experiencias sexuales como en sus juicios sobre el comportamiento humano. Saludada en su momento como una atrocidad moral por los sectores conservadores -y como una obra maestra por escritores tan distintos como T.S. Eliot, George Orwell o Lawrence Durrell-, en la actualidad es considerada una de las novelas mas rupturistas, influyentes y perfectas de la literatura en lengua inglesa. También publicado en tapa dura en nuestra colección Edhasa Literaria en la que están siendo publicadas una gran parte de sus obras como: Trópico de Capricornio, Primavera negra, Sexus, Nexus, Plexus, ... ArchivoPietro | Oct 26, 2020 | Okay, so no plot, and the characters are mostly detestable misogynists. Almost everything I hated about "On the Road" is present in this book as well. But, holy cow, this guy can write! There are plenty of long slogs through filler material, but then, BOOM, he will throw in two or three golden pages where, as he stares into yet another woman's naked crotch, he suddenly glimpses the entire universe in perfect clarity. One of the few books I've read where, upon finishing it, I'm left with the urge to read it again to pick up all the stuff I missed the first time. A really hate the way the book ends, by the way. The fact I would still want to reread it despite hating the narrator is a testament to just how good the book is when the writing really sings. ( ) James_Maxey | Jun 29, 2020 | Though I only "liked it," I think four stars is a more appropriate rating because I can imagine that I might have "really liked it" had I read it earlier in my life. It certainly has its powerful moments, but it has largely lost its ability to shock with so much imitation in contemporary literature. Honestly, in my estimation, Miller is a better writer than Burroughs, Bukowski, and all of the Beat writers (especially Kerouac), but his strange obsession with Jews and woefully clichéd misogyny are glaring examples of how his worldview hasn't aged well. I'm sure Paris in the early 1930s was a great place to observe the "wound which is man," but his diatribes grew tiresome and the writing wasn't enough to bolster over 300 pages. On the whole, I'm thankful for this novel, if only for its role as a forebear for Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, a novel with similar themes more artfully delivered. (  ) drbrand | Jun 8, 2020 |
 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 Publisher SeriesBiblioteca Folha (8) — 9 more Is contained inHas the adaptationInspiredHas as a study
Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for 27 years after its publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American cesorship standards 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. 
|
 Google Books — Loading...Popular coversRatingAverage: (3.63)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
2
Wikipedia in English (2)
10