hay pasajes tan pero tan lúcidos, tan hábiles que, a pesar de que el resto de la novela me haya parecido vulgar incluso abyecto, me ha hecho merecerle un lugar entre mis libros atesorados

Fuera, donde pendía la estrella negra, un silencio panislámico, como el mundo de la caverna, donde hasta el viento se serena. Fuera, en caso de que me atreviese a cavilarlo, la quietud espectral de la demen-cia, el mundo de los hombres, adormecido, exhausto por siglos de matanza incesante. Fuera, una membrana sangrienta y circundante dentro de la cual se producía toda la actividad, mundo heroico de los lunáticos y maníacos que habían apagado la luz del cielo con sangre. ¡Qué apacible nuestra vida de paloma y buitre en la obscuridad! Carne en que enterrar los dientes o el pene, carne abundante y olorosa, sin señal de cuchillo ni tijeras, sin cicatrices de metralla explotada, sin quemaduras de mostaza, sin pulmones quemados.

Tropic of Cancer is a thick read....so thick that most of the times I couldn't see where I was going. Are you rewarded for reading through Henry's Hailstorm of fancy words and metaphors? Not really. The way I see it, Miller wrote a page or two of the story and then felt obliged to append it with three or four pages of philosophical ramblings (uh,cribbing).

All female characters are receptacles for his semen, all African-Americans are despicable, all wives are domestic potatoes, subject to thoughtless cheating and abortions. Like an earthquake, the author starts from a central idea and goes so far from it and in so many directions that the reader is obliviated from the epicenter. And he repeats pages on pages of stuff so manyyyy times.

I had to reread a lot of sections, Google a lot of words. This is not a good book. It is like vomit, voluminous and disorganized.

And yet, if she had promised me the moon, though I knew it was out of the question, I would have struggled to invest her promise with a crumb of faith. I wanted desperately everything that was promised me, and if, upon reflection I realized that it was dearly impossible, I nevertheless tried in my own way to grope for a means of making these promises realizable. That people could make promises without ever having the least intention of fulfilling them was something unimaginable to me. Even when I was most cruelly deceived I still believed; I found that something extraordinary and quite beyond the other person's power had intervened to make the promise null and void.
*
Until the one for whom this is written came along I imagined that somewhere outside, in life, as they say, lay the solutions to all things. I thought, when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of life, seizing hold of something which I could bite into. Instead I lost hold of life completely. I reached out for something to attach myself to - and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for - myself. I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live - if what others are doing is called living - but to express myself. I realized that I had never the least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it. What is true interests me scarcely at all, nor even what is real; only that interests me which I imagine to be, that which I had stifled every day in order to live. Whether I die today or tomorrow is of no importance to me, never has been, but that today even, after years of effort, I cannot say what I think and feel - that bothers me, that rankles. From childhood on I can see myself on the track of this spectre, enjoying nothing, desiring nothing but this power, this ability. Everything else is a lie - everything I ever did or said which did not bear upon this. And that is pretty much the greater part of my life.
*
I was always believing in something and so getting into trouble. The more my hands were slapped the more firmly I believed. / believed - and the rest of the world did not! If it were only a question of enduring punishment one could go on believing till the end; but the way of the world is more insidious than that. Instead of being punished you are undermined, hollowed out, the ground taken from under your feet. It isn't even treachery, what I have in mind. Treachery is understandable and combatable. No, it is something worse, something less than treachery. It's a negativism that causes you to overreach yourself. You are perpetually spending your energy in the act of balancing yourself. You are seized with a sort of spiritual vertigo, you totter on the brink, your hair stands on end, you can't believe that beneath your feet lies an immeasurable abyss. It comes about through excess of enthusiasm, through a passionate desire to embrace people, to show them your love. The more you reach out towards the world the more the world retreats. Nobody wants real love, real hatred. Nobody wants you to put your hand in his sacred entrails - that's only for the priest in the hour of sacrifice. While you live, while the blood's still warm, you are to pretend that there is no such thing as blood and no such things as a skeleton beneath the covering of flesh. Keep off the grass! That's the motto by which people live.
*
I sit beside the road with my head in my hands and sob. Poor bugger that I am, I can't contract my heart enough to burst the veins. I would like to suffocate with grief but instead I give birth to a rock.

I actually liked this more than Tropic of Cancer, which was so notorious when I read it that it was a bit of a letdown. Call me a nerd, but I enjoyed reading about the frenetic telegram industry of the 40's more than any of the steamy sex scenes, which I barely remember anyway. Were they really that steamy? Well, plenty of novels since the Tropics feature even lustier gropings, but how often do you get to read about the telegram business?

Βαθμολογία: ★★★

Όσο με ενθουσίασε στην αρχή, άλλο τόσο με έχασε προς το τέλος, για ακόμη μια φορά. Δομή που κουράζει απίστευτα, έλλειψη κεφαλαίων, γραφή τόσο συνειρμική που μπορείς να προσπεράσεις μερικές σελίδες και να συνεχίσεις να διαβάζεις χωρίς να χαθείς. Αναγνωρίζω πάντως τη λογοτεχνική του αξία, σε αντίθεση με τον Bukowski και άλλους συγγραφείς του είδους.

His clarity of vision is at times startling. I can imagine there being two camps when it comes to Henry Miller, those who find his accepting and passive (in a sense) attitude amoral, and those who find it enlightened and at times profound. I fall into the latter camp. Maybe if choosing a world without evil was possible it would be the best choice, maybe not. Maybe our concept of evil has become too cartoonish and overly simplified and life comes in shades. Shades and shadows in which strange crustaceans may dwell.

To be honest, I can't even finish it and he truly lost me when he said that he feels like Dostoyevsky's brother. I mean yeah sure, if by that you mean adopted brother, that never met or read anything by Dostoyevsky, That's fine, I too consider myself the sister of Aphrodite - no, wait, I can't lie to myself as bad as Mr. Miller so we will make that into - I too consider myself the adopted sister of Aphrodite.

So I started this book in 2012 and I finally give up today.

Certainly some ridiculous crude parts but then other sections are great. It's interesting and fascinating at times to read about life in New York in the 1920s and his extreme counterculture perspective.

This is supposed to be autobiographical. But you learn more about the author's thoughts here than about his life, and maybe not even about his thoughts because he writes in such a high-flown manner that you get the feeling that he writes not so much as to share anything with the readers but to impress them. Except when he writes about his sexual escapades in which case he becomes stark and vivid.

You then wonder what this novel could have been (better or worse?) had he done it in reverse: clear about his life and thoughts, and playful about his sex. Maybe the readers can then have answers to questions like what he read other than Dostoevsky, how he got to write well, what happened to his mentally-retarded sister and his wife whom he called "the wife" all throughout the novel, what made him cynical about marriage and religion, the source of his anger, etc. But then, again, Henry Miller wrote this for a different audience (1961). Back in the day, a writer can still shock and titillate readers with cynicism and in-your-face profanity.

نهاية ثلاثية المدارات لهنري ميللر

عبقرية … جنون … فُحش … نقد … فقر … وكره شديد لبلاد العام سام

هذه هي محاور الثلاثية وهذا الكتاب تحديدًا ، قدرة لا نهائية على الحكي والاستطراد ، من حياته الحالية إلى ذكرايات طفولته وعودة ثانية إلى حياته تتخللها آراؤه الشخصية عن أمريكا - البلاد التي يكرهها خاصةً عند مقارنتها بأوروبا.

الوصف الجنسي يحتل أكثر من 90% من الكتاب - فلا عجب إن تم منع نشره في ستينات القرن الماضي

La contraportada dice que es una novela con lo que no estoy de acuerdo.
Me costó mucho trabajo mantener la atención porque no es una historia como tal sino un revoltijo de textos desordenados sobre recuerdos, aventuras, opiniones, ideas y sentimientos sobre la infancia, familia, amistad, aventuras sexuales, el trabajo, la muerte, amor, el sentido o sin sentido de la vida y los motivos para elegir seguir viviendo del protagonista y narrador de estos textos, un adicto al sexo por lo que encontrarás muchas descripciones eróticas de una manera excepcional, un ególatra, descarado, hedonista y arrogante con actitudes narcisistas y de sociópata a quien no le gusta trabajar y se la pasa pidiendo dinero prestado, vive y vagabundea pensando y analizando todo lo que le pasa, hay pasajes que me dieron mucho asco y otros con prosa poética hermosa y sublime. Hay contrastes y choques emocionales, de sabores, olores y sensaciones.

This is his (Miller's) second novel but instead of continuing his accounts of Europe and making any kind of saga extending from Tropic of Cancer, he puts it in reverse and gives a retrospective of life in New York city, both his formative years in Brooklyn and the years he worked a grueling job at a Telegraph company as a hiring clerk in Manhattan. Like Cancer it's full of sex and food(both two of his favorite subjects) but the overall dialogue with his characters is more compelling and seems (somewhat) less embellished than before. He loses whatever pithy, journalistic fashion of writing that may have been dominant in Cancer, delving much deeper into singular characters whether ex co-workers or lovers. It's still very muscular and fast paced like his debut but it's also very lyrical and tends not to rely as much on shocking rants and cynical diatribes. in truth though there is still much to be had in that way but one of the great things about reading early or late Miller is that no matter how vitriolic or pejorative he gets, he always manages to come back to the surface and sometimes fly above with grand epiphanies and elation as if he had just been purged of all the ugliness that he was just on about..by way of going on about it. Very inspiring.
The best parts of the book to me are the little surreal flights he subsequently takes on the page apropos some memory of walking around Brooklyn or times square. These show what a bizarre and vivid poetic imagination he has not to mention a good deal of insight into what went on his mind all those years ago. As a real critic said 'there's nothing like him when he gets on a roll'. Really incomparable. When he starts contemplating God, existence on earth, himself etc etc, he can really be quite brilliant and mesmerizing. This is why I'm more prone to cite him as my favorite philosopher rather than my favorite non fiction writer.
Anyways, I'm not much for critiques...but this shit is worth every penny you pay for and more.