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Rating: Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller is one of the books that have shaped me as a reader and, I dare say, as a human being.
The last time I read it was at least 15 years ago.
Here Miller reaches heights that go far beyond the somewhat superfluous autobiographical elements of his other works (his best book in my opinion is Black Spring, which, even though it draws from more or less autobiographical episodes, takes you to enchanted places between France and Henry's pictorial imagination that have little to do with the merely anecdotal, yet amusing, passages of, say, Tropic of Capricorn or Nexus).
The linguistic experimentation and the poetic prose are fantastic in this book, which is best appreciated in the original language.
The first person is used brilliantly and is truly engaging.
One thing that distinguishes Miller's autobiographical writing from the sometimes sad contemporary epigones (epigones of autobiographical writing, not of Miller; Miller is many degrees above, when he commits, without any systematicity however) is that he MAKES YOU SEE THE WORLD OUTSIDE, with his eyes. There are few moments of exclusive interiority, and even when he takes you on a stroll among his demons, his tics, and the neuroses of an ordinary man, confused and disoriented like everyone else, all the outside world shines through these passages, the war and the impending madness, and the inability to find his place as a writer in an increasingly less spontaneous and more mechanized world. In short, Miller's autobiographical writing is aimed at the exteriority, at what happens outside, in the streets, in the squares, on the steps of the cathedrals, in the apartments of friends or newly met strangers. It's a journey through the Paris of American expatriates in the 30s, wayward and uprooted like him, artists or wannabe artists, people traumatized by wild American capitalism trying to save themselves by exploring another world, a world much less depersonalizing than the desolate U.S. metropolises.
Henry Miller's autobiographical writing has a long and noble tradition: Proust, Celine, Kerouac, Bukowski, Houellebecq, and many others that I can't remember right now, an autobiographical tradition that has the merit and the strength to make us understand that exteriority comes first and shapes even our deepest interiorities, that pure interiority doesn't really exist; it's a romantic myth that has caused more harm than anything else.
We are in the realm of Celine's Journey, which not coincidentally, Miller had just read before writing this. Not quite at those levels, but Tropic of Cancer is a very worthy epigone.
Among the stories told by the very boisterous (and in his own way, dark) Henry, there are episodes so raw, grotesque, and surreal that the reader can't help but wonder if they really happened or not. Another inevitable question is how the unemployed Henry not only survived and found the time to produce epoch-making novels but also indulged in bars, drunkenness, hotels, restaurants, and of course, escorts.
There is nothing left but to reply that it is all part of the mystery and picaresque charm of one of the most important novels of Franco-American fiction of the first half of the 20th century.
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By Black Wings
Torn the veil of Maya, he discovers that beneath it there is nothing, less than nothing. But he enjoys that nothing, and with furious joy, because it is the only real thing.
This is not a book, in the usual sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a spit in the face of Art, a kick to Divinity, to Man, to Destiny, to Time, to Love, to Beauty... to whatever you please.
