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Rating: Henry Miller - Tropic of Capricorn - 1939
When thinking of a great storyteller, a great and fluent prose, anyone can come to mind for each of us, based on our personal experiences and the readings that have accompanied our journey of cultural and literary growth.
Personally, I believe that Henry Miller is among the most engaging and rewarding reads one can find. Among his countless texts, almost all of which are strongly autobiographical, I chose "Tropic of Capricorn," a book that manages to shake every mental structure thanks to an unparalleled penetrating force. This force is determined by the immense ability demonstrated by the author in knowing how to recount episodes of real and lived life in a manner totally devoid of deceitful or artificial substrates.
"This man knows everything about me, he wrote all this for me... "
George Orwell, commenting on some writings by Miller.
This is the essence of Miller’s work that is found to the maximum extent in this text.
What Miller has managed to do in "Tropic of Capricorn" is to get acquainted with our every nuance and explain it to us as if he knew us intimately, making his experience, the experience of all.
Miller, narrating his own vicissitudes, tells about the common man, tells about his sick New York of the twenties of the last century, with various flashbacks, where work, family, childhood, sex, thoughts, money are all one to confirm an existence that drags on, that rolls along the brink of despair, and where those in power who do not know how to manage it are as null as those who would like to have that power. It is the story in nothingness, which like a lenticular cloud rises swirling, collecting the disinherited, the idlers, the drunkards, but also the rich and powerful in a globality that makes us understand that we are all equal under the same sky and sometimes warmed by the same sun. In Miller’s work there is no falsehood and everything is free from moralism, so the tale of sex is equal to the tale of job seeking, the brothel is treated on par with a job interview or a walk in the park. This, obviously, caused endless censorship troubles for Henry Miller, and this book, published in 1939 during his escape and stay in Paris, was deemed immoral in the United States and its publication was only unblocked in 1961, thanks to a judge who had the courage to read his works and finally define them: "Not obscene."
"Once the soul has been released, everything follows with absolute certainty, even in the midst of chaos. From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: a fluid that enveloped me, and I breathed with gills. In the substrata, where the moon shone steady and opaque, it was smooth and fertile; above, it was noise and discordance. In everything I immediately saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my own worst enemy. There was nothing I wanted to do and could also not do."
This is the beginning of the work. A series of stabs to the reader's heart, who can only understand how these phrases are the distillation of existence itself, where one mirrors oneself in a narcissistic act but losing arrogance and falsehood, naked to face the most inner self, in a writing totally free from any narrative duplicity, immersed, with one’s own self, in the adventure of life.
Sex, which has caused so many legal troubles for Miller, is a tool and if it is often used without parsimony it is because it is so in life: if pornography is the sex of others and others are us, the circle is nicely closed. The tentacular potpourri of memories and descriptions, sometimes crude sometimes poetic, ensures that sex, while explicit and supported by explosive narrative and style, becomes a metaphorical and cathartic expedient, never didactic.
This is a fundamental novel not only of American literature: its universality is dictated, simply, by the truth. True Masterpiece.
Sioulette
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