Meandering and pretentious. This book had enough evocative descriptions and trenchant observations to make me want to finish it but it also had so much nonsense that it was a struggle not to give up midway.

moricand

I loved this book. It went with me to one of my most memorable travels to the northern part of Pakistan (chitral) where I spent 10 days alone, not being able to part with this book. you can read my blog about it as well:
http://yogini786.wordpress.com/2011/0...

I can’t finish it. I tried, I really tried.

Just an excellent and happy feel book about Henry Miller's life in the US, his philosophical views on life, writing, visitors galore (many with presents), family and friends, etc.

I have most of his books but I definitely prefer this and also "The Colossus of Maroussi". With these two books one is able to enter into the soul of the man. Very enticing indeed...

This book has been added to my "favourites" book-case at home to join all the books of his friends Lawrence Durrell and Anais Nin.

kinda okay. the region must be visited, more than anything.

I really enjoyed this one, I like Miller's writing and with this book it just felt like I was hanging out with him at his cabin, having a drink and listening to him talk away. He is often brilliant, inspiring, sometimes he can be a total buffoon, I almost put the book down around mid-point after I had enough of some of his spiritual epiphanies. (He starts sounding like a new age guru, he even mentions dianetics a number of times.) But I'm glad I kept reading because the last section of the book "Paradise Lost" is excellent, with some his best writing, a gem.

A very different side of Henry Miller. As in, he is not a complete asshole and was probably not wasted when he wrote it.

"An inviting land, but hard to conquer. It seeks to remain unspoiled, uninhabited by man." Henry Miller's Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch combined three of my favorite things in one: the writings of Henry Miller, the works of Hieronymus Bosch, and the awe-inspiring landscape of Big Sur. I tried to imagine on reading this what Big Sur, still today a relatively untarnished stretch of coast and wilderness, home to many migratory birds and blankets of fog and mist, must have been like then, in the late 1940s and 1950s. I read a bit of this work over the summer, while vacationing in Big Sur, though unable to visit the Henry Miller Library, which was closed both days I was there (I assume in response to the pandemic). And although there is a constant stream of cars traveling down the winding coastal highway, the landscape all around must still be something like it was in the days when Miller lived there. It's a place less spoiled by humankind than many others I can think of, and it is in many senses a paradise.

In the first two parts of the work, Miller describes the landscape of Big Sur along with the people that lived there at the time, an eclectic group of writers and poets, of men and women who came to Big Sur to escape from a capitalist economic system that left them empty and in search of meaning, of misfits, vagabonds, loners and mystics; but most of them among the most decent people he had ever encountered.

But it's the third part of this work that is perhaps the most interesting, a character study of the French illustrator, astrologer, occultist, pornographer and general loafer, Conrad Moricand. We only hear Miller's side of the story, which is that Moricand was a friend of his in Paris, passed off on him by Anaïs Nin, whom he cherished for some unknown reasons, chief among them that Moricand had given him a copy of Balzac's Séraphîta, which had made a great impact on Miller. Frequently down and out (something the younger Henry Miller was no stranger to), Miller invites Moricand to live the rest of his days (at Miller's expense) with himself and his family in their tiny one room home in Big Sur. Moricand takes advantage of Miller's generosity and the situation does not end well. Humorous, horrifying and amusing all at once is the story of Miller's days at Big Sur in Moricand's company, and the work may be worth reading for this excellent study alone.

Reminiscent of Thoreau, a bit of the spirit of the Beat Generation, and all-through Henry Miller as only Henry Miller could do it, this is a work that brings to life a place, a landscape and its people, alive as they ever were in a location that seems to be painted by the hands of God, and the home of an assortment of characters, birds of prey, wild creatures of the earth, and even phantoms that sing from the depths below the cliffs of Big Sur.

Henry Miller, long after Paris, contemplating life, conjuring wisdom, but still asking the big questions. A worthwhile read for Miller fans and one of my favorites.

Henry Miller is the reason I read as much as I do and this is the book that started it all for me, I have read everything the man has written and there is profundity even in the most profane of his works, there is not one piece of his writing that I would rate below five stars.

I first purchased this book at the Henry Miller library in the 1990s. I finally finished reading it and I realized that this version of Henry Miller, the 45 year old living in Big Sur with his wife and child, is a different version of the 1930's Paris Miller, but still Henry Miller. This is the strength of the book for me, because for all the censorship and controversy around Miller's Tropic books, he always had a certain world outlook that remains fairly consistent throughout his writing. His philosophy is one that happens to resonate with me, even when I don't agree with it. The big question for Miller is always what does it mean to live and how does one live well. There aren't a lot of authors that tackle that question head on over and over again. Miller is one.