This was the first Henry Miller book I ever read, and until I read The Rosy Crucifixion, I considered it his best. Most readers and critics seem to focus on the sexual aspects of Miller's work, or else the profanity, or that his work was autobiographical, and they tend to say that his work isn't relevant to a 21st Century audience. I disagree; while his language might be more suited to an audience from an earlier time, and his cynicism and sexual explicitness might put readers off (personally, I think his sex scenes were poorly written and the least important aspect of his work), his ideas, especially concerning his life as an artist, are more relevant and illuminating than anything the publishing industry has vomited out in the last twenty years.

I suppose I should preface this review with a warning. This is an explicit book. This book has full of sex. And this book has no plot.

Ten years ago, when I was a senior in high school, I read Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. It opened my eyes. It was the first book that I read that had no plot at all, and I was looking for a story in the book, and yet there were none. It was just a three-hundred page rant about the traipsing of the author. I liked it.

This time, I read Tropic of Capricorn, ten years after reading the first book. And once again, I was amazed.

Why did I pick this book? Well, it was first published in the 1930s, but it was banned here in the United States for about 30 years, due to the sexually explicit content of the book. However, I suppose I like this book due to the fact that this gave way to freedom of speech and expression.

So, what is this book about? This is a narration of a character named Henry Miller and his escapades in New York City. He has sex with several women in the book, and it seems that he is the most virile character in literature that I have encountered so far. He describes in painful detail the encounters that he has with several women, Jewish women, secretaries, people he goes swimming with, and other women that intersect with his life. He describes how he is able to have sex with a woman who thinks that her genitals are too small for having sex, he describes how is has sex with a woman who has a fear of drowning in a lake, and he describes how he has sex with a woman who used to be his music teacher.

He has a typology of "cunts" and describes what these various types are, with the "supercunt" as the most elusive of them all. He is perhaps the most sexed up person in literature I ever read. But, as the narrative ends, I realized that Tropic of Capricorn is about Henry Miller's image of women, as the book ends with saying that if you want women to last, you should turn them into literature. And after reading this book, I am glad that I did pick it up, even though it was ten years after I read the first book. 4 out of 5 stars.

"I am so thoroughly healthy and empty. No dreams, no desires. I am like the luscious deceptive fruit which hangs on the Californian trees. One more ray of sun and I will be rotten."

n  n
Henry Miller

The first thing, if you are lucky, that you discover about Henry Miller is that you shouldn't introduce him to your wife, your sister, your mother or any other female that you care to leave unsullied. He is like a bloodhound once he catches the scent of a female that he has not had carnal knowledge with. It wasn't that Henry made the best of first impressions, but give him time, give him an evening with a nun, and she'll be at the altar the next morning, still trembling from a night of degradation, renouncing or reaffirming her vows.

Henry fought with his wife, the first wife, the one with the shovel face, like two piranhas caught in a barrel. If you have read any of Henry's books you know that he shares his life, everything, even the stuff that makes him look like a lout.

"When I got home my wife was awake and sore as hell because I had stayed out so long. We had a hot discussion and finally I lost my temper and I clouted her and she fell on the floor and began to weep and sob. The girl upstairs came running down to see what was the matter. She was in her kimono and her hair was hanging down her back. In the excitement she got close to me and things happened without either of us intending anything to happen. (I didn't believe that part for a second.) We put the wife to bed with a wet towel around her forehead and the while the girl upstairs was bending over her I stood behind her and lifting her kimono. I got it into her and she stood there a long time talking a lot of foolish soothing nonsense. Finally I climbed into bed with the wife and to my utter amazement she began to cuddle up to me and without saying a word we locked horns and we stayed that way until dawn. I should have been worn out but instead I was wide awake, and I lay there beside her planning to take the day off and look up the whore with the beautiful fur whom I was talking to earlier in the day. After that I began to think about another woman, the wife of one of my friends.

Henry is a man that is never satiated. One conquest launches him on a quest for the next one. With a clap on my shoulder and a squeeze Henry always has a new story that has me shaking my head. By comparison, I feel like my life is as boring as a Methodist sermon.

Henry is living for all of us.

Like every other fool I know...I've lent Henry money. Lent, that is rich, I'm still deluding myself. He doesn't repay a loan. He makes you forget you lent it to him in the first place. I remember one night when a mutual friend of ours explained the circumstances with Henry.

"If you need a little money I'll raise it for you. It's like throwing it down a sewer, I know, but I'll do it for you just the same. The truth is, Henry, I like you a hell of a lot. I've taken more from you than I would from anybody in the world."

Henry just grinned as our friend's hat passed around, and even people that had known him less than an hour tossed in a bit of green. It wasn't until we were leaving, weaving our own snake trail out the door, that my friend discovered that along with the money, Henry had also absconded with his hat.

I was with Henry the night he met the nymphomaniac Paula. "She has the loose jaunty swing and perch of the doubled-barreled sex, all her movements radiating from the groin, always in equilibrium, always ready to flow, to wind and twist, and clutch, the eyes going tic-toc, the toes twitching and twinkling, the flesh rippling like a lake furrowed by a breeze. This is the incarnation of the hallucination of sex, the sea nymph squirming in the maniac's arms.", Needless to say I left by myself, but not before Henry touched me for a Jackson.

I have never figured out if Henry is a coward or the bravest of the brave. He rejects the life that I spend so much of each day trying to build for myself. He didn't tell me this, but I found it in one of his books.

"I realize quietly what a terribly civilized person I am-the need I have for people, conversation, books, theatre, music, cafes, drinks, and so forth. It's terrible to be civilized, because when you come to the end of the world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness. To be civilized is to have complicated needs, And a man, when he is full blown, shouldn't need a thing."

The thing of it is Henry couldn't be Henry except for the existence of people like myself who are always willing to buy him a drink and marvel at his stories. He is living off the efforts of "civilized" men and women. He doesn't have to own anything, because someone will always give him what he needs.

"He had neither pride, nor vanity, nor envy. About the big issues he was clear, but confronted by the petty details of life he was bewildered."

n  n
The Nasty Genius

The thing of it is, despite his best efforts, Henry Miller became a useful member of society. He published books describing a life so unencumbered that even those of us perfectly satisfied with our soft lives, eking out a possession laden life of soulless corporate kowtowing, have doubts that we have chosen our lives wisely.

Henry met this woman named June who hauled him off to Paris.

n  n
June

I don't get to hear his stories first hand anymore. I have to buy his books to find out what he has been up to. I miss Henry. He had me gaze upon the greener pastures on the other side of the fence, but he couldn't convince me to jump over and stay over. Every so often, despite his better financial circumstances, I still get a note from him with a plea for a few dollars for old time's sake. I, the dutiful enabling friend, always send him what I can spare.

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Written in 1939 this autobiographical novel focuses on the life of the author as a prequel to the earlier Tropic of Cancer (based in France where Capricorn ends). This novel is ostensibly set in New York with the sexed up, brutalized life of a lesser manager in the Telegraph company. The repeated use of the C word, explicit promiscuous sexual relationships of the men and women is constant so much so that the novel was banned in the US & UK until 1964. The story is slightly non-linear but appears to me to be is two halves the first sexual & base, the second more philosophical as he leaves his wife and kid. So seems a mix of Faulkner, Sartre and Selby.

Some quotes:
“The proof is the fact and the fact has no meaning except what is given to it by those who establish the facts”

“Nothing is lousier and emptier than the midst of bright gaiety clicked by the mechanical eye of the mechanical epoch, life maturing in a black box, a negative tickled with acid and yielding a momentaneous simulacrum of nothingness”

A very interesting read opening a window on the underside of humanity's more fundamental drives.

Everything I ever said about Henry Miller is NOT true. I was a senseless child when I read The Tropic of Cancer and I thought he was a machist and so on and you know what? I want to read the freaking Tropic of Cancer again! And now I sole it so I have to buy it again! damn youuuuuuu. But I had the book in Portuguese though and I want to read it in English, so it was not so bad after all.

Anyway, it was one of the happy moments of 2014: recognizing that Henry Miller is an intelligent, sensitive human-being and that I want to read more from him.

There was so many beautiful sentences in this book and brilliant thoughts and ways of living your life. It was very introspective for me. I am normally a fast reader but this book took me 3 weeks or something and it was only because it was so dense and profound for most of the time. loved it! really really loved it.

Thanks for your insights Mister Miller! It doesn't feel so bad anymore to think of yourself as kind of alienated and for wanting more out of life and for not fitting into boxes.

I think the quotes I added from this book speak for themselves.

Men want one thing and it’s disgusting. For crucification fetishists, “no doesn’t always mean no” men, and the worst Dostoevsky worshipers.

"When you have given up the ghost, everything follows by dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos".
My copy is worn to shreds. I used to carry it everywhere I travelled, like how a Christian carries his bible or a Muslim his Quran. But not out of devotion or prostration to it's author, nor because of unrequited nostalgia for a time and place I never knew. The time when Blaise Cendrars drove one-armed around Paris and entered bars by the Pigalle calling out: "Champagne pout tout le monde". It is rather because of the pitch black sorrow in the tale and the faith that somehow, someway, we can endure. In other words; comfort.
I remember the first words by Miller I ever read, the cover of the paperback and its alluring title. And I remember the day he died. At that day I was probably less than 30 kilometers away from his death bed and very young but not too young to clearly remember what time of day it was, the home built radio I heard it through and the color of the room I was sitting in.
It is not easy to give up the ghost but if you can have courage enough to do it, everything else will indeed follow by dead certainty. Chaos is just a words describing an order not yet understood.

In certain respects this work supersedes that of Cancer. If Cancer is a work that revolves around fluids, around the Seine, around piss, spermatozoa etc. then Capricorn is one of solids. In Brooklyn we find ourselves forced to go toward the spiritual Land of Fuck, in the Southern States we are forced to contend with arid landscapes and racial tensions so tense that they could kill a man through a mere gaze.

The best way to describe the work is to highlight Miller’s own self described evolution from skater to swimmer to rock. Having broken through the futility of Dante’s ice, Miller quits the skating shtick and joyfully dives in to the freshly thawed oceans, before realising that one must become immutable at the very depths of the ocean. One must paradoxically be bone dry surrounded by the sea, a lighthouse that stands strong against the ensuing waves.

So yeah, this shit was pretty fucking good. Especially loved whenever he brought up Dostoevsky, Bergson or Nietzsche, it’s fun to see what he reads into them.

V knihovně jsem si musela výpůjčku dvakrát prodlužovat, vůbec jsem se nemohla začíst.
Styl je na můj vkus příliš rozvláčný a dobový.
Než jsem se dostala k trochu zajímavějším pasážím, byla jsem už knihou dost znuděná.
Byla jsem na knížku docela zvědavá, ale mé očekávání bylo vyšší, než jak dopadla realita.
Připadá mi to jako takový rozvláčný "brainstorming z mého života". Ve své době to mohl být kontroverzní román, dnes už mi až tak zajímavý nepřipadá.

In the contraversal debates on Fifty Shades of Grey this was one of the books suggested as being a better read. So I thought I'd try it. I'm almost halfway through the book after much skim reading - for me on the negativity of life - I'm ready to throw the towel in and move onto a more pleasant book.

Worse than Tropic of Cancer. Vulgar for the sake of being vulgar, and no compelling plot, characters, themes--in short, nothing that warrants literary merit.

Tropic of Capricorn, along with Tropic of Cancer, may have been groundbreaking at the time, but without the historical context they're just crude, misogynistic, violent, and ugly. When it is not that, it is boring to the point of punishment. Miller writes like a stoned undergrad, contemplating his place in the universe through endless oblique metaphor--basically, he's that guy who always used song lyrics as his status updates and then if you ask him what they mean, he would smugly say, "Oh, nothing."

Not worth the time it took to read. Contemplated throwing it away multiple times while reading it but I wanted to give it a chance to see if it improved. It didn't. I want my time back.

Although this novel less famous than tropic of Cancer - for example 8,174 ratings, 309 reviews against 26,082 ratings, 1,465 reviews in goodreads - But it's the better one.

When i read Tropic of Cancer i were prepared to all the beauty in it, I read it many years ago translated into Arabic, read many articles about it, But with Tropic of Capricorn - as i thought that Miller is a one work artist - it was like an aesthetic shock. Again the beautiful language, again the charming prose, I'm ready now to read Miller's writing about anything even an advertising catalog.

As in Tropic of cancer Miller talking about a lot of nonsense matters, But it is always how you talk about something not the thing itself that makes the great literature and art.

Some of the most amazing parts which delighted me are:

- The employees of the telegraph company that he wrote his worst work about them.
- The beautiful description of a day in his life.
- kronski's expecting him to be a great writer, And here i must express my admiration of Miller's believe in himself.
- All events related to Curley.
- His description of the real friendship when talking about Roy Hamilton.
- How Dostoyevsky and Bergson's book "Creative Evolution" effect his life.
- How his friend lend him money with love and lecture.

So why i didn't give it the 5 stars, because sometime Miller seems to lost the concept which he discuss and only remain the beautiful language which isn't a small element but not every thing.