Fascinating and prescient look at America in the 1940 and its future, once you get over his fascination with the antebellum South including a defense of the slave economy. In spite of this (gaping) flaw, it is something any critic of contemporary critic of American culture should pick up.

Miller grabs you by the mental testicles and yanks. Scathing social commentary hits the bullseye with clarity and breadth. This happens to be the first work of Miller's I've read, oddly enough, and I'm already an addict. On to more...

A bitter account of the America that Miller found on his return from Europe in 1940. Miller wanted to be reconciled to the county of his birth that he had left in disillusionment for Paris in 1930. But what he found as he drove through the industrial midwest horrified him, and confirmed his earlier conviction that his native land had lost its soul. Miller was awed by the land, but dismayed by its occupants. The only exceptions to this dichotomy were located in the South. He held up New Orleans as comparable to European cities for its sophistication and appreciation of good living. He also liked Charleston.

Reading this books feels like talking to a very interesting person.
Some of the chapters are fantastic, many others are just ok.

« He repudiates form. He writes as we think, on various levels at once, with seeming irrelevance, seeming chaos » wrote Anaïs Nin of Miller.

And so he does in The Air Conditioned Nightmare, a recollection of his year of traveling the US after his return from Paris, where he lived for almost a decade. With his usual brilliance and mastery of the English language, he describes landscapes he traversed, characters he met along the way, and shares reflexions and reveries.

I have always had an interest in travel books that are about times and places past. There is something about being able to see a vanished world through vanished eyes. I was astonished to learn that Henry Miller wrote a travel book about a road trip he took across America in the early 1940s. Henry Miller!, oh my god, his Tropic of Cancer is one of those books no one ever forgets; notwithstanding its position as one of the great novels of the twentieth century, it is the filthiest thing I have ever read. And yet, and yet, the sex is secondary to his masterful storytelling about what it was like to be down and out in Paris in the twenties and thirties. With just a couple of sentences Miller could vividly set a scene or describe a person so that readers feels like they are right there.

So, I went online to search the used bookstores, and found a copy of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. It’s not at all like his earlier works. He seems to have cleaned up his act a bit to appeal to a larger reading public – and of course, to avoid being banned again. Still, it’s not your usual travel book.

The first two chapters are Miller at his angry stream of consciousness best. He had just returned to the States from Europe, and he loathed what he saw. He hated virtually everything and everyone, piling up invectives one atop the other. Although he didn’t use these words, it came across as “You Americans, you’re uncultured, unenlightened and miserable; ugly, stupid, ignorant, spineless, lazy, and racist; mindless drones in a corrupt and soul-crushing political and economic system – if you had souls that is, but you don’t, since you’re not French. And oh yeah, your kids are probably ugly too.” He also needed money for his trip, but shuddered at the thought of actually getting – oh horrors – a job.

The third chapter is the best in the book. It starts with Miller’s take on the American prison system, and segues into a sympathetic conversation with a man just released and trying to get his life back together. The man is soon forgotten, however, and the rest of the chapter is an extended riff on suffering as an intrinsic component of human existence. One unforgettable passage is

You crash a gate made of arms and legs only to get a butt blow behind the ear. You pick up and run on bloody, sawed-off stumps, only to fall into an endless ravine. You sit in the very center of emptiness, whimpering inaudibly, and the stars blink at you. You fall into a coma, and just when you think you’ve found your way back to the womb they come after you with pick and shovel, with acetylene torches. Even if you found the place of death they would find a way to blow you out of it. You know time in all its curves and infidelities. You have lived longer than it takes to grow all the countless separate parts of a thousand new universes. You have watched them grow and fall apart again. And you are still intact, like a piece of music which goes on being played forever. The instruments wear out, and the players too, but the notes are eternal, and you are made of nothing but invisible notes which even the faintest zephyr can shake a tune out of.

That’s good stuff, although two paragraphs later he goes off the rails into even wilder free association, with “devils who laugh like antelopes,” and “hammerclaviers fitted with cloying geraniums.” Antelopes? Geraniums? Time to dial back on the drugs, Henry.

After that the rest of the book is interesting, but not particularly unique. The travel parts serve as a framing device, and the chapters are mostly devoted to character studies of people he meets. There is even a charming bit about him taking two small children to the zoo in Albuquerque. Toward the end of the book it gets back to being a road trip, and the section from the Grand Canyon to Los Angeles in an unreliable car is quite good. The final pages talk about Hollywood, which, not surprisingly, he finds utterly vapid and soulless. Kind of like Hollywood today.

This is not your standard travel book, but if you like Miller, it is worth your time.

Henry Miller is someone I see as having no sentimentality. Why? Because he was a writer renowned in his time as lover & king of the erotic. It's hard for me to see those type of people as sentimental.
Whoever, he proved me wrong - he was. Henry Miller seems to be at his most sentimental & weak point in "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare" (1939) when he in a very sentimental way mourns the state of Indian reservations & celebrates the inherent dignity of the Indians. This shows that perhaps Americans have been rather sentimental about those affairs for longer than we thought.

Ignoring some of the more unpleasant aspects of the person and reading this as a commentary on what America became after WWII, it is nothing short of amazing. Anyone who has spent long stretches outside of the U.S. will find something achingly familiar in this story.

blows my mind that this was written in 1939-1941, or somewhere in those years. It could have been written yesterday. Milller's critique of America could have been written yesterday by Lewis Lapham. I suppose I should read Dos Passos to get an even earlier critique of the American way..... I loved the book but felt Miller was a little vindictive in some of his criticism, but still his descriptions are wonderful and his intellect and keen thought shine through.

Henry Miller es uno de tantos escritores malditos norteamericanos, todo adicto a la literatura ha pasado o lo tendrá que hacer por referencia en algún momento por novelas como “Trópico de Cáncer” y “Trópico de Capricornio” junto con su trilogía “Sexus”, “Plexus” y “Nexus” aprovecho sumar y recomendar a estos clásicos literarios la obra “Días tranquilos en Clichy” un libro corto y probablemente no tan conocido pero si admirado y respetado por todos nosotros los Milleradictos. Todos estos son libros esenciales en una biblioteca que desee tener una pequeña muestra de lo más importante de la literatura norteamericana. Hablar de Henry Miller es hablar de rebeldía, de provocación, de rabia, de golpear las teclas con furia y sexo dando como resultado una influencia literaria en casi todo lo que se escribió en gran parte del mundo desde la década de los ’50 hasta la actualidad.

Conocía de la existencia de este libro por el boca en boca de lectores y libreros amigos de toda la vida pero jamás había podido dar con este texto, aparentemente hay una edición argentina pero no estoy muy seguro de que editorial la haya publicado ni en que año, asumo que probablemente sea por mediados de 1960. Fue a finales del año pasado cuando supe de la existencia de esta edición española a cargo de Navona Editorial y decidí leerla de inmediato para al fin saciar la curiosidad de esta pesadilla de la que muchos me han hablado tantas maravillas.

En “Una pesadilla con aire acondicionado” Henry Miller regresa de París y quiere reencontrarse de nuevo con su Norteamérica, ver si queda aun algún rasgo o sentimiento de cariño hacia Estados Unidos luego de su partida a Europa sin dinero y regresando de igual manera al lugar que el mismo llamaba “la ratonera”. Miller retorna con ganas de destruir la forma de vida y las bases de casi toda la sociedad norteamericana con sus escritos, un regreso lleno de odio y critica social en el que durante este libro nada queda en pie, para él pareciera que hay que derrumbar todo sin caer en el anarquismo para comenzar desde cero, y es así que Henry Miller invita a un amigo a viajar junto a el de costa a costa por todo el país y de esta manera dejar por escrito lo que ve en el llamado american dream.

Una narrativa que en algunos momentos puede resultar algo surrealista, filosófica y bastante descriptiva a medida que profundizan mas y mas este viaje que deja por escrito todo lo que le perturba de esta sociedad norteamericana, es así como Miller con su ojo critico y filosófico comienza un viaje por un país que se estaba formando y una sociedad que para él comenzaba a marchar por un camino equivocado. Este viaje resulta una decepción absoluta con todo el entorno y las vivencias que tiene junto a su compañero. Los momentos mas intensos son sus pensamientos sobre lo que es el crimen para las sociedades, no duda en ponerse del lado de los criminales aunque en su opinión cada uno de nosotros somos criminales que de una u otra manera cometemos delitos legales con casi todo lo que hacemos normalmente cada día. Me llama mucho la atención el interés que despierta la Masonería en Henry Miller ya que se dedica a explicarla y hablar sobre ella con mucha profundidad y agrado, habla sobre el futuro de las Logias y de la humanidad. Finalmente me he divertido mucho con el momento junto a Edgar Varese, dos genios juntos en un libro y en vida llega a ser lo mejor de la novela.

En resumen, “Una pesadilla con aire acondicionado” no es para mi la mejor obra de Henry Miller, creo que uno puede sobrevivir tranquilamente sin leerla, quizás me llenaron de muchas expectativas todos los amigos que me la recomendaron, no es una obra al nivel de los trópicos o su clásica trilogía ni tampoco busca serlo, Miller está muy claro en ello. La recomiendo para los que deseen pasar un rato entretenido leyendo a un maldito de la literatura que ataca con furia al establishment.

Es de agradecer la maravillosa traducción a cargo del poeta José Luis Piquero quien se especializa en traducciones de Joseph Conrad, Saki, Arthur Miller, Francis Scott Fitzgerald y Tennessee Williams entre tantos otros, su traducción se hace para uno como latinoamericano muy agradable para leer sin encontrarse con algunas palabras que en otras traducciones a veces pueden chocar un poco e interrumpen la lectura. Es la primera vez que tengo la oportunidad de disfrutar una de sus traducciones y estoy seguro que no será la única.

summary: henry miller is a old man, he has aspergers, the park bench is too uncomfortable, they wont let him feed bread to the ducks at the park, theres too many negros at the park, theres too many dog at the park. hendry miller discovers yoga. henry miller eats, prays, loves.

i hate american as much as the next guy but id rather read america-hate from a real authentic french cool guy (baudrillard much??) than a wannabe french bitter expat guy, even if tropic of cancer was good, sorry henry milner. didnt even finish this book, i got like 90 pages in and accidentally tore it in twain out of boredom, RIP

I often didn't agree with what he said, but I always enjoyed how he said it. Quote from page 192: "The duck is plucked, the air is moist, the tide's out and the goat's securely tethered. The wind is from the bay, the oysters are from the muck. Nothing is too exciting to drown the pluck-pluck of the mandolins. The slugs move from slat to slat; their little hearts beat fast, their brains fill with swill. By evening it's all moonlight on the bay. The lions are still affably baffled and whatever snorts, spits, fumes and hisses is properly snaffled."