Kad procitam cijelu trilogiju moci cu dati bolji osvrt. Sto se tice Sexusa napisan je jednostavno, razgovornim jezikom. Prilikom citanja imate osicaj da Miller piše spontano, bez razmišljanja o stilu i razradi rečenice. Mogao bih ga usporediti s piscima tvrdokuhanog stila, iako se razlikuje po povremenim esejističkim i filozofskim odlomcima, koji su ponekad genijalni, a ponekad višak unutar fabule. Roman je nabijen pornografskim opisima, koji su također ponekad smiješni, ponekad jako realistični, a nekad i pretjerani. Likovi se u romanu često javljaju naglo bez pripreme i uvoda tko su i sto su, a neki jednostavno tako i iščeznu, rekao bih bas kao i u pravom zivotu, ali recepijent s tim moze pogubiti nit romana i tesko je pratiti tko je tko ili koliko je tko važan lik. Ipak roman se najviše koncentrira na lik Henrya Millera (nije ni pokušao sakriti da opisuje svoj život s nekoliko zasigurno izmisljenih događaja) Henry je pisac koji nista jos nije napisao, redovito zivi na rubu egzistencije posuđujući lovu od prijatelja koju troši ugl na hranu piće i žene. Tijekom cijelog romana "muči" ga ljubavni trokut između žene Maude i ljubavnice Mare/Mone. Glavni lajt motiv romana definitivno je hedonizam, zivot kakav je Henry Miller i prakticirao, unatoč svim poteškoćama.

I tried to finish reading Sexus this weekend, but I just can’t. I wish I could erase it, that I could go back and get the time I spent back. I first took it to read four or five years ago and gave up. I decided to try again thinking maybe I was not ready to read a Miller’s book. I was wrong. I don’t know what category I can put this book. It tries to be a philosophical book like Brothers Karamazov, but all the caracter has to make philosophy is his sexual adventures or lack of good life.

I don’t know if my christian thinking and way to see life made me a wrong reader of this book or if it is really that bad, but the fact is that Sexus sucks!

It is difficult to follow the line of thought and the sequences at Miller’s life. I could never tell who he is with and why he keeps changing women for he is definitely incapable of love and being faithful. He treats women like things at Sexus and keep going thinking he is some kind of great man.

I got boring trying to keep up my mind with the dirty book. I gave up again. I know now this is definitely a book I will never finish reading. And all that I want to read was Nexus because I thought it would be a mix of literature and philosophy. I gave up ever trying to read it too.

http://wordsideas.blog.com/2012/07/09...

dnf. gross

Should have stayed banned

I finished this a little while back but haven't opened this visual bookshelf in awhile. The sex is a footnote. Henry Miller is insightful and witty. Even if he changes the subject the way most people do when they talk, he's a good talker and therefore a good writer. You want to read Miller, like people undoubtedly wanted to listen to him talk when he was living.

رائع أيها الهنري الداعر.
الجنس هو قالب ميللر الذي يصب فيه فلسفته ورؤيته الفنية للحياة والنفس. ومع التفاصيل الغير عادية لحياته الجنسية التي يذكرها، أجدني غير مبال بالقائلين: هل هذا مقبول أو غير مقبول، لأن ما يذكره، ويحكيه عن حياته وتلك الحقبة الزمنية من عمر أمريكا، هنا يجعلني أتجاوز تلك النقطة، بلا مبالاة تامة..
طبعا، سأستريح، أو بالأحري سآخذ هدنة قبل أن أشرع في المتابعة مع الجزء الثاني من ثلاثيته العجائبية: الصلب الوردي..

Read in the 1970s. Unforgettable. I recall when it was recommended, that when the author submitted the manuscript, he told the publisher not to touch one word. Publish as it is or not at all.
The book has a palpable sense of place and time.

I saw a film (I stupid way to begin) in which Henry Miller was made out to be an amazing author.

This book has some good parts and has the feel of A movable feast by Ernst Hemingway but Ernst is far better in describing everything he experienced, and had some truly incredible varied experiences. Plus he was to the point and kept your interest.

With Henry it was the opposite he would ramble on for several pages on what he probably believed to be deep and meaningful insights but quite frankly were fucking moronic at best.

Victor Hugo rambles on in a similar way but then rewards you with an amazingly intricate story that suddenly becomes breathtaking.

Again Henry does not achieve anything near this level. Also maybe back in the day his love scenes (or written porn) may have been provocative but quite frankly in this day and age most of it seemed unbelievable and somewhat bizarre. Not to mention these events just seem to be thrown in out of context and completely irrelevant to the current situation.

It was entertaining at times but sixty percent of the book is pointless and meaningless.

I was stupid enough to buy all three…..fucking imbecile

Why do lovely faces haunt us so? Do extraordinary flowers have evil roots?
Studying her morsel by morsel, feet, hands, hair, lips, ears, breasts, travelling from navel to mouth and from mouth to eyes, the woman I fell upon, clawed, bit, suffocated with kisses, the woman who had been Mara and was now Mona, who had been and would be other names, other persons, other assemblages of appendages, was no more accessible, penetrable, than a cool statue in a forgotten garden of a lost continent. At nine or earlier, with a revolver that was never intended to go off, she might have pressed a swooning trigger and fallen like a dead swan from the heights of her dream. It might well have been that way, for in the flesh she was dispersed, in the mind she was as dust blown hither and thither. In her heart a bell tolled, but what it signified no one knew. Her image corresponded to nothing that I had formed in my heart. She had intruded it, slipped it like thinnest gauze between the crevices of the brain in a moment of lesion. And when the wound closed the imprint had remained, like a frail leaf traced upon a stone.

Henry Miller reminds me of Norman Mailer in some ways. You have to accept the good comes with the bad for both these guys. Sexus is probably the best representation of that maxim as you're bludgeoned over the head for five hundred pages with some of Miller's sleaziest and smartest prose. You will either love or viscerally hate what he has to offer. No doubt about it though, this guy could write.

Henry Miller is nothing short of a favorite writer of mine, after just one book. I feel like I discovered a whole new universe between his pages. I feel like I’ve been let in a secret club of people who can feel so deeply that their hearts beat in the spine of the book, who can be filled with so much of anything that their blood oozes in the spaces between letters. To say that I like his writing is an understatement – I fell in love with it.

This semi - autobiographical work is, in itself, very good fiction. I’m sure it’s embellished, in true style of every over achieving author, but it’s not embellished to the point where you don’t believe it anymore. The characters are real, they’re human through their flaws, through their denial and acceptance of life’s moments, they are a bunch of “characters” in the real sense of the word: people whom you find hard to believe you would see on the street, in your neighborhood, because such individuals could only gravitate around someone like Miller. He is the center piece of this trilogy, and by all means, he has to be.

His portrayal of himself is pathetic: he’s a man of a thousand vices, of which just the first are women and alcohol, he is weak in his will to do anything except for laying around and having fun, he is defined, ultimately, by his cowardice and laziness. How, can you ask, is he then the great man that I advertise him to be? Well, he’s a genius - the way he writes beggars belief. I could not have expected more out of his work, and I feel sad that I haven’t read him earlier.

There might be people out there who find his style shallow and empty, as his life was all about himself, sex, himself, literature, himself, sex, alcohol, sex.. you get the point. But I beg to differ – even in his most dirty episodes, those that give feminists heart attacks, he never shames women, never debases them. They are, to him, part of the few things beautiful in this world, part of what is to be worshipped, be it that his prayers come in the form of sex (did I say he had a lot of sex?). In order to understand his take on women better, I advise anyone interested to read his correspondence with his wife, Anais Nin. They are exquisitely beautiful declarations of love and you can recognize his penmanship in there, as well.

To “Plexus”, I say!

Sorry, Henry Miller. Maybe it was the Elizabeth Taylor novel seething at me in my next-to-read stack, or maybe it's your tedious, ho-hum, not-very-impressive sexual escapades and superfluous, neurotic use of the ol' c-word, but I just couldn't finish this one.
Don't get me wrong, Miller's got some spunk, so to speak, and when he isn't relating you the mundane struggles of him in the early 20s to cheat on his wife, leave his wife, fuck everything that moves, and his slightly more interesting friends in his orbit, Hank's got some really beautiful things to say about life, art, America, and all those things. The problem is that unlike in the Tropics in Sexus, and I assume its successor volumes, he feels like he has carte blanche to extend everything good about those novels into hundreds of pages of indistinguishable episodes of crotch-grabbing and family neglect.
When he's leaning into actual thought, Miller is a fine writer with some excellent ideas about life, but this gets too bogged down into smut for smut's sake (at least by the standards of that time: you'll find worse in your average G.I. Joe erotic fan fiction) and effectively ruins the work.