Miller is my hero, clearly.

Oh, Henry, you wiley saint. Nexus surprised me, because for once in this series, there was more Crucifixion than Roses. Henry Miller is the eternal optimist. He drinks from the essense of life. He just wants to live, with all that entails. He has an almost manic dedication to it.
But in Nexus, that optimism comes under strain. Mona is cheating on him with her friend Stasia. She is still whoring herself out to make a living, while insisting he stay home and focus on his writing rather than getting a job. Problem is, he's approaching forty and hasn't published a thing. He writes in his head, but his thoughts move too fast for his hands. Also, he can be incapacitated by self-doubt. A word from a frenemy or a belligerent elevator operator can derail him. Expectations of genius from Mona, his landlady, people who meet him along the way, etc. can be as constraining.
Until Nexus, the Rosy Crucifixion was a tough read. It was worth every second, every difficult word or phrase or stream of consciousness. Nexus was far more straightforward in the story it told. This does not make it better or worse. It did mean that I read this within a week, whereas the other two books took months.
I love Henry Miller. I wish he was alive today. I wish I could reach his heights. He is an inspiration as a writer and as a human being. It was hard to watch his crucifixion, but he made it all incredibly worthwhile.

Not as good as the first two parts. I don't know why i hate Mona, the feeling was there when she first appeared, here it was clear Mona has a bad influence on Miller. Not only in his life but even when he writes about her.

Only three remarkable parts deserve to be mentioned:

- Trying to get a job at Hobson and Hotbein where he met Jim.
- His discussion about literature in ch.16.
- The last chapter.

If we didn't know what's happened to Miller in his first years in Paris we would be dying to read about it.

Indubbiamente ci sono passaggi interessanti, me li sono pure appuntati. Ma è troppo discorsivo, troppo "interrogativo" e non abbastanza narrativo :( Meno divertente di "Tropico del cancro".

In this terrible year of living horribly, how comforting to return to the incomparably batshit bombastic H. Miller... My spirit drunk uncle, frenetically prancing about on the pages, expounding on this, remembering that, describing in ludicrous hyper-reality all that he feels, thinks, utters out loud, to himself or with others, about himself, others... Self-deprecating, revelatory, aggrandizing and loathing... often within the space of a paragraph.

How good to feel his 'vibrating lyre strings', his man(n)ic effusions, his Rabelaisian eye for detail - flaws, perfections and humor - within every contemptible human encounter.

How far above the others he soared! until the hot air inevitably left his sails, or the wings melted off, and it was back to work, scrounging and scrabbling for the next cup of coffee.

Ah yes, n  Henry Millern... How good to spend time with you again.

Man reflects on his life and people then leaves for a holiday.

أوه، ياله من كتاب ( الثُلاثية ) - كتاب الوحلِ والسماء ؛ إن صحَّ القول !

بديعٌ هذا الميللر : البذئ، البرئ، الجرئ، الجامح .. بديعٌ ومُريعٌ بتعرّيهِ - هُوَذا عارياً تماماً، ويرقصُ وسطَ غابٍ من حديد عشبُهُ الدولار - أميركا! - مُغنياً بالكلماتِ الأشدّ حِدةً وفتكاً ؛ هُوَذا في الكتاب الطويلِ الطويلِ، يعوي، يبكي، يكوي نفسَه، ينادي، ينبذُ، يئنُّ أنينَ كلبةٍ عُضت، يرنُّ رنينَ وتر، يحنُّ إلى الأقدمينَ، يُجنُّ شبقاً وعِشقاً ... وعوداً على بدءٍ يعوي هاجياً أميركا والموتى السائرون !

Enjoyable! I liked it a little less than Sexus but more than Plexus (Plexus is great but 300 pages too long). This was leaner and still had plenty of nuggets.

Miller's racism is so confusing to me. He'll use terrible slurs or dehumanizing language on one page and then decry the treatment of black people on the next. He seems to champion the downtrodden and punch them in the face simultaneously. I don't give him a pass but I can understand a man who was born in 1891, who spent almost the entirety of his life in segregated America will have prejudices. His are just very contradictory so it makes it difficult to grasp. Maybe that's the point? Probably not.

You'll like Nexus if, like me, you're not hung up on plot and want to sink into ideas, regardless of their sequence/flow. The book is basically a waiting room -- Miller's killing time in Brooklyn before he can transform himself as writer in Paris. In the meantime, he's got a lot to say about love, family, sex, writing, god, death, and pretty well everything.

Nexus is the third in a series, so if you haven't read the first two, you get the impression you're missing out on the specifics as to how he came to be living with his wife, Mona, as well as another flighty artist named Stasia. Stasia eventually leaves, and neither of them seem to care all that much what happened to her, and enjoy being free of her, though they both love(d) her. He calls it a "poverty-stricken sort of freedom... What a drab, dismal, fateful day that is when the lover suddenly realizes that he is no longer possessed, that he is cured, so to speak, of his great love!"

No one can accuse Miller of trying to write about anything other than what he knows, so naturally a lot of the book is simply his thoughts on writing. He says point-blank what every aspiring writer has probably said to him/herself, but never had the balls to put into words. "The great question was that eternal, seemingly unanswerable one: What have I to say that has not been said before, and thousands of times, by men infinitely more gifted? Was it sheer ego, this coercive need to be heard? In what way was I unique? For if I was not unique then it would be like adding a cipher to an incalculable astronomic figure."
And later, "Do you know what's the matter with me? I'm a chameleon. Every author I fall in love with I want to imitate -- if only I could imitate myself!" He's hard on himself, but has this refreshing way of accepting his shortcomings: "What could be more considerate -- better manners! -- than to treat thoughts, ideas, inspiration flashes, as flowers of delight? ... But to exploit (the idea), to send it out to work like a whore or a stockbroker, -- unthinkable. For me it was enough to have been inspired, not be perpetually inspired."

Miller's descriptions are so original - the kind of scenes you'll have no choice but to think about again, when something will trigger it. He goes to sweaty, throbbing nightclub, for example, saying: "I merely craved to become like an ordinary mortal, a jellyfish, if you like, in the ocean of drift. I asked for nothing more than to be swished and sloshed about in an eddying pool of fragrant flesh under subaqueous rainbow of subdued and intoxicating lights." This is a portion of this huge, perfect image he creates of a dancefloor.

I don't think I'll go out of my way to read the first two in the series unless they somehow fall into my possession, but if you love Miller's style, Nexus won't disappoint.

ES la cosa mas rara pero , desde que empece a leer literatura con sexo explicito (empezando con DH Lawrence a los catorce años) , siempre mi idolo fue Henry MIller .

--Siempre me gusto mas Miller que Anais -

ESto es mucho mas que su reputacion ; no es solo erotismo explicito , va mas alla de su fama .

There is an element of the exotic and the animalistic in Miller, but at his core, he is a typical and rebellious American. He is equally at home comparing himself to a dog or to Jesus, and through these images, he traces his evolution from Wastrel to Want-Not Prophet, from his dingy childhood to idyllic Paris. On the surface, it is easy to see oneself in Miller's desperate attempts to sort out love, work, money, and art. ...and really, Miller is so likable in this last installment of The Rosy Crucifixion precisely because he is exactly like most other Americans: cursing our day jobs and fantasizing about the adventures we will have when we are fortunate enough to retire. I may be exaggerating a bit, but Miller manages--at least in part--to relish life and his role in it, regardless of both its glories and its flaws. He learns to let go, pick up, embrace everything, value nothing...this book almost reads like Miller's Enlightenment/Gnosis/Reincarnation/Resurrection...and that is the idea.

Read the full review at BookWormWood (My Book Blog).

no plot just pure, unfiltered metaphysical garble paired with thoughts on writing. awesome.