A long-winded and haphazard narrative which read as nothing more than a personal diary.

Though the fantastic Tropic of Cancer was the impetus for picking up this novel, after reading Capricorn, I hardly remember what I really enjoyed about Miller from the beginning. Here Miller takes a most selfish journey, leading the reader through a series of vaguely connected memories of his childhood and times growing up in New York City. The disconnectedness of his narrative and tiresomely long passages of him attempting to stab at his existential position make for a difficult read. It became one of those rare books that I found myself desperately awaiting the end in hopes for a better next read.

It wasn't all negatives, however. Capricorn did remind me that Miller was years ahead of the beatniks in his indifference and spontaneity. He's helped me successfully destroy my image of the well-mannered, "boring" early 20th century.

This wouldn't be a holistic review if I somehow ignored commenting on the nearly pornographic descriptions of him and his (many) lovers. Despite their entertainment value (and their ability to offend the weak of heart), I found it almost became difficult for me to read the passages. I felt that if someone were to peak over my shoulder, they'd have a hard time differentiating this "fine, classical" literature for a sappy adult romance novel.

Miller also dips into insight every now and again; some noteworthy quotes and ideas emerge from his shambled literary landscape. The man can piece together fantastically new ways of saying things. He's clearly an associative and creative genius. At the end of the day, I would have much rather shared a few pints with him at a bar than have read Capricorn.

If only he could have held my attention or made me care in some way about his plight.

Best enjoyed by people who mistake boorish callous assertiveness for rebellious romantic integrity.

Reading this again 10 years after the first read - I couldn't ask for anything more. I could never identify with Cancer, mainly because of the Paris setting but also the idea that he had already jumped the precipice at that point. Here is before he left New York, in the depth of his confusion and trying to find a way to transcend it but always just digging himself further in - cut this with his childhood references and you have a document of not only what brooklyn and the city once was, but surprisingly how static life in the city truly is. People complain of details changing but the reality is the definition of New York is change and yet at the same time the lives and attitude of the people never change.
There is so much more, but it doesn't really matter in a review becuase it is much too personal. I will say though as unamerican as Miller proclaims to be, ironically he is probably the epitome of the stream of consciousness roughneck american style that whitman started and was embraced by the next generation of the 50s/60s and now dominates all american literature - ie that auto-biograph crap that Opera pushes and the masses gobble up.

Se c'è una cosa che mi rimarrà di questa lettura, oggi che torno a Miller a 9 anni dalla prima volta, è la traduzione di Bianciardi.

"Esser generoso significa dire sì prima ancora che l'uomo apra bocca. Per dire sì dovete prima essere surrealisti e dadaisti, perché così avrete capito cosa significa dire no".

Miller fu dadaista per amore del gesto, distruttivo che fosse ("forse fui il solo dadaista d'America senza mai saperlo"), surrealista nella scrittura (immediata, quasi automatica), vitalista ai limiti del fanatismo ("cos'è un fanatico? Uno che crede appassionatamente e agisce disperatamente secondo quel che crede, o sempre credevo in qualcosa e così mi mettevo nei pasticci"). Che piaccia o no, questa sorta di Evoluzione creatrice milleriana (Bergson è citato come un fatto importante e, ancor prima di lui, Dostoevskij) si presenta come un'autofiction ante-litteram dettata da un'amoralità espressiva tanto urgente quanto deliberata, da "un amore perverso per la cosa-in-sé [...] la cosa scartata, che tutti ignorano".

henry, i have finally defeated you. i feel euphoric knowing i never have to touch this book again. to the people who told me this is better than tropic of cancer, you have awful taste and i'll never trust again. henry, you're either a liar or a rapist and neither option is great really. i did quite enjoy the last 50ish pages though.

Eh... Lo dejo, es bastante aburrido de leer. No creo que lo retome algún día, por ello pongo la puntuación de una vez.

I am not giving it the same 5 stars as I have for Colossus of Maroussi but it still deserves 5 stars
"Miller still has the power to wake us up"

"It was here in the void of hernia that I did all my quiet thinking via the penis."

Miller's two Tropics are cosmic rages against conformity and the naivete of the normal, clone-communal life. It's hard to say but tempting to think that much of his writing was mere excuse-making for having abandoned his wife and children and taken up a bohemian life when he was well past his youth. You might feel that this is the case here, since much of Capricorn is taken up with admirable and even highly poetic invectives against the disgraces of our "modern" world. Miller seems convinced that a kind of retro-primal or pious perversity (not necessarily sexual but certainly often expressed that way) is the way out, and perhaps it was for him at a time of stultifying, so-called "morals". It's the same kind of rage against the world that often pops up in the arts, like the works of Irvine Welsh. That's the closest parallel I can think of at the moment.
Yes, the novel, if you can even call it that since it's more like filth-laden confession, is crass and rife with deragotory terms for pretty much everyone, and peppered liberally with discussions of both the c-words in almost encyclopedia fashion, but there is a rough beauty here that shouldn't be discounted. The work as a whole reads more as a kind of bawdy, steam-of-consciousness testament to the futility of materialism or something like that, I dunno. If you're not easily offended, you'll likely find much of value here, aesthetically at least. I'll close with a sentence that opens my favorite section, just to prove it to you:
"Before I shall have become quite a man again I shall probably exist as a park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest."

Ik vervloek dit boek met heel mijn hart. Het is mijn aartsvijand. Ik ben dit boek al zo’n vier jaar aan het lezen en ik heb het nog steeds niet uit. Toen ik met het boek begon dacht ik mijn god dit is het mooiste wat ik ooit gelezen heb. Elke pagina is zo prachtig en volgeladen met metaforen dat Oscar Wilde er stil van wordt. Helaas maakt het het boek ook zo ontiegelijk onleesbaar. Na een paar dagen ben ik weer helemaal klaar met het boek en denk ik aan mij niet besteed. Maar dan na een aantal maanden heb ik weer van: toch wel jammer dat ik het niet heb uitgelezen. Is eigenlijk wel mooi. Irem wat zeik je nou? Gewoon ff doorzetten! En dan pak ik het toch elke keer weer op. Eigenlijk zou ik het gewoon opnieuw moeten lezen want ik ben helemaal uit het ritme, maar daar heb ik ook geen zin in want dat vind ik nooit chill. Het boek is net als moderne kunst: vermoeiend, je moet er soms lang over nadenken om de boodschap te begrijpen, maar wat ben ik blij dat het bestaat.

What do you say about a book that is almost exclusively mental masturbation? At times Miller can be excruciating but for the most part I like his boldness to turn anything floating around his head (both of them) into engaging literature. Contrary to what most reviewers have said about this one, I actually liked it best when his tangential whirlwinds focused on childhood memories and other daily minutiae rather than the bizarre sexual ones. Probably because I'm reading this in a vastly different time than when it was first published in France during the '30s and purely sexual writing doesn't pack the same punch nowadays. "Shocking" writing tends to descend into self-parody pretty quickly but I think Miller stays afloat for me because his audacity extends into all sorts of subject matter in his writing. It's a tough balancing act, but ultimately his imaginative force really is what propels this book into a triumph perhaps surpassing even Tropic Of Cancer.

Milerov autobiografski roman predstavlja meditaciju o ljudskom postojanju, pun je introspekcije, blistavih misli, umirujućih pogleda na reku Senu i jadanja jednog usamljenog čoveka.

Knjiga je ostavila gorak i opor ukus za sobom, zaista sam uživala u nekim momentima, ali u nekim sam se i gnušala (odnos prema ženama, mnoštvo prostitutki kao i bojazan od prenosivih bolesti itd). Takođe, početak mi je bio jako konfuzan jer je prebrzo skakao iz priče u priču, bez da je prethodnu zaokružio.

Pomenula bih da sam knjigu konzumirala povremeno u protekla dva meseca, dok sam čitala druge knjige i zaista mi je prijao takav tempo za ovakvu vrstu literature. Ukoliko i vas kopka ova knjiga, ali vam je i malo mučna, možete probati ovako doziranje ,,na kašičicu".

Za Milera je Pariz grad večniji od Rima, njegovo utočište. Ipak, prikaz života u Parizu bez krova nad glavom i novca u džepu na jedan lepši i dostojanstveniji način radi Orvel u knjizi Niko i ništa u Parizu i Londonu!

a riot of self demanding, of living every depth to feel the dizzying height of the highs. finding nothing in the meaningless repetition of days, jobs and women, Miller is peeling away the layers of automation that he sees all around him, that he sees killing everyone in the world, especially in the emptiness of America. until he is left with a startling vision, a manifesto, a new covenant to rise up to. a breathless read.

Miller's anti-narrative of life in 1920s New York reads like a rude, careering, vent of frustrated ambitions and intelligence; a bad-mouthed On The Road that goes nowhere until after the narrative finishes. There are numerous things that will put a reader off this book: the plot-less, almost stream-of-conscious delivery that gallops along through the chaos of the author's life, the crudity of the language, particularly in reference to sex (this has to be the most uses of the C word in a classic novel I've encountered). Indeed, accusations of misogyny have troubled the book for years, and the casual (at least) attitude toward women and sex may shock some, but perhaps no more than fans of On The Road. Speaking of other books, the contrast of this life style to the more upper class lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald's characters, albeit in the same period and similar area, is considerable.
tThis is a story of raw, rude, visceral, frustrating intelligence trapped in a mundane life of working drudgery. What marks Miller's Tropic books out are his philosophical underpinnings. Miller sees an emptiness pervading America, in every coast, city, street, apartment, room and mind. He loathed and feared the acceptance of consumerism before it became consumerism, rebelling against it in his daily existence, seeing a nation of automatons defined by their pointless consumption. Long before the counter-culture of the 1960s espoused such values, Miller was railing against this creeping emptiness and vowing to never fall to it. As such, he moved to Paris for some years, where the precursor to this novel (Tropic Of Cancer) was wrote and published, detailing his time there in much the same manner as Capricorn.
tLike On The Road, and Tropic Of Cancer, the writing left me breathless, a tumbling, reckless, thundering storm of intelligence, self demanding, questing and questioning. It is self aware to a painful, self loathing, degree: all too aware of his failings, his cravings, his deceptions and lusts. But at the same time, his expectations and belief in what people can be, what he can be, are the driving force of this restless book.