Tropic of Cancer (1934)

2.5 stars.

Have you ever known a twenty-something young man who arrogantly believes he knows everything about everything? This is 319 pages of that guy, mostly while he's drunk or high. It's just a whiny bigoted blog, albeit with moments of brilliance.

Our hero alternates between being emotionless and overwrought. He is mostly morose with giddy times. The story also alternates - between vignettes of him and his pals and stream of consciousness wandering about everything he encounters.

It was much harder to be reading the deeply sexist and racist attitudes during the end of the 2016 election cycle. Clearly, it was part of the prevailing mindset in the 1930s. Nevertheless, Miller uses certain words so often that I'll be glad to never read them again.

I also wished for some positive impressions of Paris, but the location isn't pleasant or, God forbid, romantic. It's a place filled with prostitutes and destitute people who are scamming for their next glass of Pernod.

Yet, there are passages with beauty and tension like: "The streets were my refuge. And no man can understand the glamour of the streets until he is obliged to take refuge in them, until he has become the straw that is tossed here and there by every zephyr that blows."

The main character gathers his stories, thoughts, and in his own way bares his soul. He believes "... that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul."

After finishing the book, I can understand both why it's considered great twentieth century literature, and why it has been banned. I just didn't especially enjoy my time within its pages. ( )

The saga of an ex-pat in France - poverty and debauchery. Took me a while to stop flinching at some of the language. Glad I didn't bail.

"Everything is endured--disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui--in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable." ( )

Immediately within several pages I recognized the influence Henry Miller had on Jack Kerouac. Loopy sentences stiches together like poetry in a sense. Poetry always slightly out of grasp for me. The described sex is boring by today's standards. May have been titillating in the 1930s but clumsy now. Everything a little too "dirty" (literally) for my taste. I'd rather read Hemingway on Paris.
As I progressed into the novel I found parts of it fascinating and very enjoyable. Some lines are memorable such as him describing that his best thoughts come when he's walking and he needs an assistant to follow him around writing it all down. At one point he made a trip to a region outside Paris and encountered a new group of characters. That was interesting. Otherwise, I skimmed the last 40 pages having had enough of his philosophy regarding the world.
As another reviewer put it, I would not recommend this book to anyone ever. Dated and overly misogynist. ( )

And to think that I was annoyed year after year cause Miller's books weren't available on the Amazon Kindle store.

So when I finally got Tropic of Cancer in a different format ... it was too late for me to enjoy it. Too late as I've already read Bukowski, Hemingway, Thompson so I know that there's, if not many for sure, a handful of authors capable of telling more with less, and do so while exploring the dark underbelly of the world. Nah, too late cause this is 2016 and western society is to far along to be left open-mouthed by tales of vanilla sex or abject poverty.

So bored by his interminable descriptions that led nowhere I left this book half finished and I feel no remorse. ( )

A remarkable novel from start to finish on pretty much every level except, as my rating shows, on the development of any memorable character worth remembering or any plot. But that’s a weakness of my rating system, not the novel.

In fact, pretty much the point of the novel is that plot and character are what’s got us into the mess that Miller is trying to draw our attention to; this is about as anarchist as you could get for this genre in the 1930s. To bring defining societal models such as personality traits or storylines into Miller’s work would have been anathema to him.

The novel is one long pursuit of happiness through the ‘freedom’ of doing whatever you want, whenever you want to do it and with whoever happens to be lying around when you get the urge. The expression of this urge through sex was what got Miller’s book banned not only on its initial publication but also on its second
publication in the US thirty years later.

Reading it nearly 100 years after he wrote it though and you’ll not be as shocked as his contemporaries were. What you get is a very lucid picture of interwar bohemian Paris. In fact, if there is a character at all in the novel that is described in any detail, it’s the city itself.

Miller’s philosophy not only manifested itself in a refusal to maintain social boundaries. It also gave rise to his unwillingness to follow literary form. The novel is written in a style unique for the time with unconventional prose that is at time utterly remarkable. There are parts where it doesn’t work out so well but, as is the nature of experiments, you always learn something.

Those who learned went on to become great writers themselves: Burroughs, Kerouac, Easton Ellis. Some, such as Erica Jong, even borrowed Miller wholesale to make up for their inability to innovate style even if they had an original point of view.

There’s no doubt this deserves its place on the 1001 list even if you don’t appreciate the subject matter at times. Its influence has shaped the novel as we know it and, for that, it should be read by anyone interested in the novel as a medium of human expression. ( )