Ну шо, хайп навколо Міллера я не зрозуміла.

Якшо дуже коротко: чувак правдами і неправдами спав з багатьма жінками, часто на шар зі своїм другом. В книжці дофіга сексу, але - як на мене - мало еротики, “kink” і естетики якоїсь чи шо?

Вибачте за французьку (pun intended), але з варіантів градації еротичної літератури між «займатись коханням», «займатись сексом», «трахатись» і «їбатись» - ця книжка про останнє. Часто описи здаються не стільки «без цензури», як вульгарними і крінжовими (наприклад, «застромив їй по саму рукоятку» або «мій член, немов натренований тюлень, радісно зринув вгор��» - секстинг на всі гроші

Never has a man, before or since, been able to find such trouble while still carrying himself with as much aplomb and gravitas as Henry Miller. You'd almost (ALMOST! But not quite) think he was a real gentleman. His contrived chivalry seems to fool many a sashaying skirt. His style is definitely not for the prudish or easily-offended. At one point, a girl's cunt (a term he uses regularly) is referred to as a suction pump ("she's got a cunt that works like a suction pump") --quite the compliment, really.

Not for the faint of heart or easily offended. Henry's days were hardly quiet, but ever so French, and I loved the picture he painted of Paris.

Oh Henry, you naughty naughty devil, you...

Miller just isn't for me.

However this book did have a great moment where the protagonist goes to Luxembourg and afterwards provides some amusing insights:

'The quiet, dull life of a people which has no reason to exist, and which in fact does not exist, except as cows or sheep exist,'

'Luxembourg is like Brooklyn, only more charming and more poisonous,'

'Better to die like a louse in Paris than live here on the fat of the land.'

Iako je "Rakova obratnica" Milerov klasik, "Mirni dani na Klišiju" je daleko zabavnija i čitljivija knjiga. Mileru se može, ako se želi, zamjeriti dosta toga, od seksizma i mizoginije do krajnjeg pesimizma, ali mu se jedno mora priznati - da je beskrajno duhovit, a naslovnica ove knjige komotno može da bude onaj meme"Look at all the fucks I give."

I hate men oh my god

تستحق 4 نجوم. لكني اسقطت نجمة للاباحية المبالغ فيها التي تملأ العمل تماماً.
العمل لا اعلم سبب كتابته فعلا. كاتبان منحطان فعلا كل رذيلة اباحية مع كل امرا قابلاها بفرنسا. يكتبان وينفقان المال على العاهرات وهكذا دواليك بعبثية غريبة. غالبا هذا حال الكثير من الفنانين وغيرهم.
نقول المفيد. سرد ميللر خارق للعادة. مدرسة. عبارات قصيرة كل عبارة فيها الجديد والجاذب للقراءة وتسارع النوفيلا الرواية القصيرة.
ساقرا له مدار الجدي

E ciudat cât de impudici pot fi unii oameni, dar e culmea cum impudicitatea lor este atât de fecundă. Nu-l pot înţelege pe Miller pentru că nu mă pot pune în pielea lui. Nu pot concepe să-mi schimb "curvele" de pe o zi pe alta, nu pot concepe cum un bărbat poate propaga atât dispreţ la adresa unei femei.
Că tot am cartea în faţă, spun acum pentru că n-am făcut-o niciodată: MI-E SILĂ DE "VORBELE DE DUH" ALE CRITICILOR DE PE COPERTA DIN SPATE! Unde-i Tudor Vianu? Unde-i Titluescu şi unde-i Ibrăileanu? Acum numai "senzaţional", "unic", "literatura americană de azi începe şi se sfârşeşte cu sensul pe care i l-a dat Miller". Fix...
Apreciez eroticul, dar nu orgia... Şi, totuşi, într-o oarecare măsură sunt invidios pe indiferenţa lu Miller. Un spirit existenţialist, dar unul exhibiţionist...

Henry Miller is my most hated writer. Sir, I'm glad you had a chance to bang so many chicks. Very radical.

After spending three turgid months edging along the Tropic of Cancer two or three pages at a time, I whip through Quiet Days in Clichy in three short sessions. By length, it's a mere novelette (I wouldn't tag it a “novella” as that implies a genre of some kind, whereas “long short story” would stretch it beyond the natural confines of fiction). It's about how Miller spent some of his decade long stay in Paris living with a French journalist/writer known as Carl. His relationship with Carl and various females form the subject matter, which flows in a single chapterless stream, taking in a short holiday to Luxembourg, and ending with another one of Miller's impertinences: a long purple passage in which he reaches a species of post-coital nirvana.
tHow, after barely finding much enjoyment in the first of the Tropic books - and only half-heartedly deciding on the possibility of reading Tropic of Capricorn at some distant point - did I fall for this? Serendipity played its part. I had a few minutes to spare and was next to the hall where Bursa's new book festival had started. I went in looking for a Christmas gift for my niece, who is studying English Literature at Istanbul University. Just inside the entrance, a secondhand stall grabbed me, and it having a large English section, I didn't take long being parted from my 100 TL in exchange for three vols: The Story of English (for my niece), Elvis Costello's autobiography (in near perfect, unread condition), and this fairly tatty copy of the Miller in question. Somehow, I couldn't resist it, coming on the heels of Cancer, the man having passed me by all these years.
tWell, I should confess, I have enjoyed this read, despite experiencing some disquieting squirms. And, I suppose to come out fighting, I should state the sexual content was not at all what kept me entertained. I still dispute if Miller's work can be called pornographic. Technically, by the way, this is pure pornography: since it is writing about prostitutes. In fact, I should have expected tales of piquant adventures with females for hire would have made up a large part of so-called erotica. But it's not even a minor sub-genre. As I discovered, while doing research for my own novel, porn divides into all kinds of weird and wonderlust categories, such as predilections for corpulence, maturity, the domestic, dominance, leather & etc.. But prostitution mustn't sell, as it features neither on the shelves nor in the archives. Perhaps because it's just as easy to buy the real thing as study a book on the subject. There are, however, accounts of visits to brothels written as reviews. In Quiet Days in Clichy, Miller gives us neither of these things. I guess someone desperate to consume smut would class his work as a hot bedtime read (say, a pimply teenager in the 1950s or 60s), but I think he steers too much on the side of honesty for whatever titilation there is to endure as an end in itself.
tHe starts off with an unflattering self-portrait of how Nys - a cut above the average working girl - relieves him of his remittance. True, he enjoys himself immensely, and there is a deal showing off involved. But then his relationship with Nys is destined to become deeper than punter/client. I guess, with Miller you have to accept that sex is always going to be a transaction, and that romance itself is only a series of trade-offs. He continues to use raw language, referring to women as “cunts”, and depictions such as empty-headed are assigned to females in terms never ascribed to men. In other words, it would be useless to argue that Miller isn't anything but a damned misogynist.
tQuiet Days in Clichy, though, differs from Tropic of Cancer in one major respect. The anti-semitism of the earlier work is here expunged, and a condemnation of Jew-hating interpolated. I wonder why? The dates and places given at the end: New York City, June, 1940. Rewritten in Big Sur, May, 1956. maybe a clue to that. In fact, some of the material covered here is in that earlier piece (see below); but what intervened between the writing done from memory in NYC, and the revisions at Big Sur, was the Holocaust. One can't help thinking Miller was anxious to distance himself from his own (literary) involvement in the greatest crime of all time by claiming he and his friend Carl had belittled an anti-Jewish restaurateur in German-leaning Luxembourg. How dashing of them!
tThe exploitation of an underage girl, Colette, cannot be whitewashed; but I fear even this has been doctored in the edit. I hardly wonder if Carl, who is given most of the blame, had approved! As the crime stands, Miller was an accessory; so I carefully read the text at this point and get a hint of legalese in the sections where his complete complicity is - shall we say – teased at. And as I read, I recall how no less a feminist icon than Simone de Beauvoir escaped prosecution for debauching a minor in 1939 (got her teaching licence revoked in 1943, the Nazi occupiers of France looking on bemused). To have judged these people by the standards of our day, their reputations would have been sunk, and their works shunned.
tGeorge Orwell, in a double-edged comment, is quoted on the back blurb praising Miller as, “The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.” If you dig out the full piece, you come upon this in the very next sentence, “...he [Miller] is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil...” Orwell, a professional reviewer himself, knew how to dish out the quotable, feathering his own in the process. But I suspect there was genuine admiration for Miller's honesty (if not “imagination” – I wonder if that's not pure irony) as Orwell is said to have spent whatever time and money he could in the brothels of Paris during his “down and out” period, without giving too much away in his own book on the subject.
tOh the clay feet of our heroes! Miller was a major influence on Jack Kerouac, whom I read avidly as a teenager. Years later, when I discovered just how bitter, twisted and rotten he became in his final alcoholic rages, I wanted to repudiate my love for On The Road and Big Sur. The latter ends with such a positive outcome from all that cheap, sweet wine he drank. You get a similar paean here when Joey (Miller) and Carl swindle a group of prostitutes into taking part in an orgy; but then, without bothering to consummate the scene, off he goes to bed, experiencing,

t“A rich, fecundating dream, shot through with a mystic blue light.”

…launched on fancy's flight, is this redemption or just the deliriums of a sex-junky?
tI refuse to be taken in. Whereas Kerouac croaked in middle age, Miller lived on until 88, writing, painting and even appearing in films. He claimed in the early 60s to have come to dislike the reputation he had for smut, hoping we would think there was more to him than the seedy old roué of his image. But then again, here he stands once more condemned for misogyny and abuse. So will I read another?

Actually, there is another piece in this book. A short story called “Mara-Marignan”...

But again, I'm not sure if this isn't so much a story as another bite of fictionalised autohagiography. Kate Millett's devastating appraisal of Miller's work (in Sexual Politics, 1971) mentions Mara many times. The name seems to stand for his ideal mate, and is spread across a host of his books and female characters. In this short piece (50-odd, big print pages) I'm not sure if it doesn't apply to all three of the women he talks about, two of them prostitutes.
tOnce again, Carl is the sidekick, and we're treated to another of those second-hand affairs Miller is obsessed with recounting in some detail. And once more, he signs the story off with a similar time and date, “New York City, May, 1940. Rewritten in Big Sur, May, 1956.” After reading Tropic of Cancer and Quiet Days in Clichy, I get the impression there is an almost limitless supply of these, just as there is a never ending flow of remittances to buy the services of girls for hire. I think Miller wants us to think there is a sacred prostitute out there somewhere whose presence he sometimes feels he's in company with. The parasitical, half crazed world of the working girl keeps drawing him as if he truly believes there is an real angel to be found. Of course, he never tells the reader this directly, but the way their company
has him swinging from disinterested benefactor to hungry hound is disarming. Millett, who dissects him like a split eel, reckons he must have been a pretty cold fish in real life. I would tend to agree, but with reservations. Which? Many, many years ago, I spent a couple of hours standing at a bar with a few fine fellows I had just met, including an ex-merchant seaman who told us about the fantastic prostitutes he'd been with in Hong Kong. When I let it out that though I was no playboy, I'd never paid for sex, the tar sensed my sniffy tone. He reminded me it wasn't on to be judgmental when you hadn't been in a situation yourself. His words coming out so matter-of-fact and without puffing up his chest, I felt a little ashamed of myself. After all, it takes two to make a transaction, and who's to say the other isn't something we simply aren't up to? I wondered if, in another life - where I ran away to sea (instead of London) - I mightn't have stood there right beside him on the Hong Kong street.
tJust like the fact Miller got away with racism and abuse that these days could have landed him in gaol and probably all washed up as a writer, the world of Paris in the 1930s is something we may have to make allowances for. After the decimation and disruption of the First World War, is it any surprise that a great surplus of unattached women turned to sex work as an sop to their pride an hunger? He was drawn to the city to write, and soon enough it was the being there that inspired his output. Even if these smutty, sexist, racist anecdotes are boastful & mean, there is a kind of honesty in them. As Kate Millett implies, his role in the early sexual revolution was less as liberator than exposer. But isn't that enough already?

Henry's books are a pleasure to revisit. It is odd how one returns to Henry's books - hundreds of books later, their flaws are even more obvious, but so too is the tenderness, the rawness, the humor, the story - and above all, the genius. Never before and never again have we had an American writer quite like Henry. To be sure there have been plenty of imitators, plenty of ecstatic admirers, and an equal number of closeted admirers - but heirs? No. Geniuses? No. America seems to breed a lot of brilliance, but only the very rare genius - but I suppose that is true of every country. What will you find if you read this book rather than Tropic of Cancer or Sexus or another, greater Miller book? The etchings of a serial exaggerator, boaster, satyr, saint - sure, the book won’t glow on the shelf, but you’ll read it and smile, read it and muse, and you’ll be the better person for it. In my opinion, the second half, Mara-Marignon, is the better story.