Henry miller at his best. Even when the prose is tedious and long-winded, his humor shines through. Mara (later Mona) is a complicated figure. Even racially, she is ambiguous. All one learns is that she has no real history or personality. She is custom made for Miller and you feel that she fits like a mold for any man or woman she desires. I'm struggling to write a review because the contents of the book are all over the place. Yes, this is roughly about Henry Miller's third wife and their romance, but you get a huge perspective on life in 1920s New York. You get vulgarity, the vulnerability of young people who move there, the cynics that Miller befriends, and the general grime. Miller never romanticizes a person or local but experience itself. He states that the phantasmagoria is the past shackled to man; he references Nietzsche by calling man a rope between animal and God. He wants to live. He is ravenous and full of love (he states he loves everything but gravy the most of all). He hopes to collect moments and mull them over piece by piece. He is Whitman's successor.

Gave me a boner

صَبَــــــوات هنري ميللر



Henry Miller by Kalman Aron



هنري ميللر هو أحد هؤلاء الملعونين الذين يفرغون أدمغتهم بكل ماتحمله من رصاص في وجهك مباشرة ودون تمويه أو تلون .. هنري ميللر هذا الرجل المجنون يخبرك عن صبواته لا في جلسة سرية معه في مقهى معتم يشغل الموسيقا بصوت مرتفع يمنعك من التركيز فيما يقوله من يرافقك، بل يخبرك بهذه الصبوات بكل تفاصيلها في جلسة علنية وبأعلى صوت يمكن لإنسان أن يجهر به .. هل الصبوات هي ما سيهمك عندما تقرأ هذا الكتاب؟؟ قطعا لا فهنا سترى فلسفة لطالما علمت أن هناك من يحملونها لكنك لم تقابل أحدهم بعد .. هذا رجل يؤمن بأن
من يتخلى عن رؤياه يقع في متاهة لا منجاة منها سوى بالموت

هذا الرجل فج كمخرز .. يستفزك ويفقدك أعصابك بنخزه المستمر لك لكنك تشكره نهاية على إيقاظه لك .. هذا الرجل يخبرك ما معنى الحياة بكل فجاجة وصدق وصرامة أيضا







ملحوظاتي
ص 468
جنون

لم يكن سيفلح لو أصبح راهبا، فلقد ولد وهو يحمل ضغينة ضد العالم

الحب مقامرة وليس وثيقة تأمين

إن من يتخلى عن رؤياه يقع في متاهة لا منجاة منها سوى بالموت

الفصل الاخير يمزقك حرفيا يجذب شقي قلبك كلا في ناحبة لتستيقظ وتعي كم قاسية هذه الحياة

Sex is dirt.
Right?

حسنا هنرى اخبرنى كيف أقيم هذا الكتاب ؟؟
من المفترض انها الجزء الاول من ثلاثية الصلب الوردى التى اساسها حياته الخاصة .
وما تم كتابته عن العمل
ان مافعله هنرى انه تناول السنوات الجوهرية للحياة فى أمريكا حين كان يتعلم فى البداية كيف يكتب وعلاقة الحب الجوهرية فى حياته وفحصهما بدقة ولكن من وجهة نظر لاحقة اكثر نضجا بكثير فكانت النتيجة سردا ساحرا بصورة لاتصدق عملا ملحميا بالمعنى الشخصى والاجتماعى والاجمالى

حقيقة لااستطيع تصنيف هذا العمل لكنه مزيج غريب وجذاب احداث حياتيه يومية ، وفلسفة ، واراء اجتماعية وسياسية ، وأفكار، وجنس .

فى العادة عندما اكتب مراجعة تتدفق الافكار او احساسى تجاه ��لعمل لكن هنا اجد صعوبة ، بداية اجد تسميتها رواية ليست صحيحة فلن تجد حبكة وقصة متكاملة ويمكن تلخيصها فى جملتين السيد ميلر وزوجته وحبيبته واصدقاءه ومعارفة .
اما الجزء الاخير فحقيقة لم افهم ماذا يريد هنرى لم افهمه جيدا ..

لكن ذلك لم يمنع ان هناك شئ يجذبنى للقراءة بشدة هناك افكار داخلية ومناقشات خارجية واحاسيس واراء جذبتنى . تشعر انه يتحدث عن كل شئ ف الحياة والمجتمع ليس عن شى محدد ، تجده يأخذك فى جميع الاتجاهات .
《مع هنرى ميلر مش هتقدر تغمض عنيك 》

n  

To be able to give oneself wholly and completely is the greatest luxury that life affords. Real love only begins at this point of dissolution.

n
I've giving this 4 stars for the wild energy of Miller's vision and writing, and the iconoclastic way in which he challenged the 'rules' of fiction - but this comes with massive caveats about the casual racism ('now a Chink was different. Chinks were white slavers. But a Jap you could trust'), implicit homophobia ('he was a bit queer, wasn't he? Didn't you tell me he was in love with a bus driver? Or was he a N***** lover?') - though women having sex together is totally ok, preferably with a male watching or participating - and complete macho obsession with the potency of the penis: 'she had several orgasms in succession and almost fainted in the process'. Incidentally, this isn't just one woman but all 'good' women in Miller-world are multi-orgasmic at the sight of a erect penis, while you know a 'bad' women because she's frigid. Oh, until she catches a glimpse of said Miller's always-erect penis, of course! Still, at least sex and pleasure are not the prerogative of men, even if the fantasies that underpin the sexual scenarios and the writing of sex are very different from, say, that of Anais Nin.

While this has been cited as literate pornography, I'm not convinced that that's true as I'm not sure this is written to titillate - in actual fact, the sex scenes are pretty samey (I soon started skimming them) and are more about a rejection of bourgeois values (though I was immensely amused that during this book, Miller is working a 9-5 corporate job!) than anything else. Sex is a counter-cultural marker as is the writing of it in explicit detail.

I came to this book on the back on Anais Nin's writings, especially her diary that details her ménage with Miller and his wife June (here known as Mara and then Mona) in Paris. The frenetic energy might all belong to Miller but the more intriguing character is Mara-Mona/June and the role she plays in Miller's own inner narrative: 'but if they are able to throw themselves at one another recklessly, concealing nothing, surrendering all, if they admit to one another their interdependence, do they not enjoy a great and unsuspected freedom?'.

It's this goal of liberation that really drives the book, and Miller's simultaneous power over, and enthrallment to, an endlessly elusive woman ('then it came to me: only if she were dead could I love her the way I imagined I loved her!') is one that reverberates through male writing in a western cultural tradition from Catullus' Lesbia poems, via Dante's Vita Nuova and Petrarch's sonnets to Laura in the Canzoniere all the way through to Swann's obsession with Odette in Proust. These women are all subject to the overwhelming literary, spiritual and physical desires of their male lovers and creators which is why it's especially seductive and a bit subversive that in Miller's case we have, in Anais Nin, a female voice from within this nexus of desires.

So I enjoyed this for its crazy whirl of youthful adventures in New York (it's only at the end that Miller and Mona start to talk of travelling to Europe), its philosophising ('the truth that the goal of life is the living of it'), and the full-on rejection of limiting conventions whether in writing or living. It's easy to see how influential this was, and it's difficult to imagine an On the Road without Miller (though Kerouac's vision is very different). Just be ready for an awful lot of hardily-erect penises and gushing ejaculations!

Nueva York. Miller trabaja en una compañía de telégrafos absurda, llena de camaradas de un mundo cosmocócico —palabra que sigo sin reconocer—. Vive con su mujer e hija y tiene un idilio con una bailarina, que acaba siendo su segunda pareja con la que sueña irse a Francia... y poco más. Tan solo un relato de los infortunios que le sobrevienen, de una manera aparentemente aleatoria.

Entre tantos hombres/andobas y mujeres/fulanas, Miller no deja de ser un sexista que elude madurar pero que se sabe con un potencial sobrenatural para la escritura. Siempre está mirándose a la luz que le reflejan sus amigos en el espejo: que si es un impulsivo egoísta, un mártir, un frustrado, un romántico, un débil sin ambición, un sinvergüenza con suerte. En definitiva, un narciso solipsista encantador. No se trata de empatizar, no estamos aquí para empatizar, me repito a cada rato. Y me pregunto por qué no soporto el "yo" de Carrère y sí el de Miller, aunque la verdad es que este Henry me resulta un poco indiferente.

Está claro que se esfuerza en encajar de la mejor manera el guirigay de la vida real dentro de la literatura, huyendo de una trama concreta. Me acuerdo de aquello que decía Philip Roth: "La vida es lo evanescente y lo tangible, lo inaudito y lo previsible, todas esas realidades múltiples, entrelazadas, que se solapan y entran en conflicto". Pue esto es. Parece que el hilo conductor de sus días sea solo la retahíla de polvos que protagoniza, pero no nos engañemos, no es más que la precariedad, esa incesante búsqueda de dinero, el único mediador de todos sus vínculos sociales.

Da la sensación de que no quisiese hacer literatura en su afán de no traicionar la vida. Sí, consigue escribir como los ángeles, siempre presa de un gran arrebato, mezclando jazzísticamente ironía, humorismo, cinismo, anarquía y erotismo; el mundo le importa un pito y su prosa hedonista me hace sonreír, pero lo cierto es que sus avatares vitales, básicamente sexo, amigos, libros y whiskis, llegan a cansarme.

I mention my thoughts here, though I could pick virtually any Henry book. I've read most of them, often a number of times. These books are totally unique, reveries, presentations of how man might live if he only had the notion and carried through on it. These books stand in total juxtaposition to the mind-conditioned state of society. They are free rambles, though carefully plotted and written! They discuss and elaborate on all man's ideas and dreams, crazy actions and adventures--both in real life and in the mind. Ground breaking is to say the least. God how lucky people are who've never read Henry and stumble upon a book like this. What a treat!

يغوص ميلر في المجتمع الأمريكي و يروي حياة المجتمع بشكل غير مباشر .
في جزء استعرض فيه حياته الزوجية وكيف دمرها بيده و أفعاله.
الرواية ليست سيرة فقط ولكن إبداع ميلر عندما يسترسل في الحديث عن موضوع كالاسرة و المرأة و الحب .
ربما يكون صادقا في نقاط لكن يبدي نظرة سوداوية

رواية VIP

Just as I was about to brush this one off as a collection of autobiographical notes of a sociopath, he writes something that softens me. I still haven't completely figured him out yet as a character. But one sure thing I know is that I despise him with a passion.
There are so many instances of racist slur, misogyny, vulgarity and violence without purpose, objectification of women and gratuitous hate that you'd think it impossible to also find whole pages of pure uplifting hope, beauty and odes to other cultures. But against all odds, they do weirdly coexist.

However, on a large scale, the book is pure trash. Garbage story, garbage characters, totally unrealistic characters that exist for the sole purpose of highlighting some key traits in the main protagonist, and overall a pretty pointless piece of writing. It's true that Miller has a beautiful way with words when he makes an effort at it, but on the course of this book, he hardly ever tries. It is worth it only for the few hidden gems that truly evoke uplifting emotion (it's quite an effort to find them in the midst of all that babbling), but only for very shortly. The longest of these gems is 2 pages long, and most are a paragraph or two - out of a 500-page book! Worth it? - Hardly.

Oh, and btw, it's not even about sex. So you can drop the curiosity. It's about the sad, long daily life of a self-absorbed, divorced, psychotic middle-aged alcoholic failure.
So there you go.

Do I need to be more of an asshole to enjoy this book? This is quite literally the worst jumble of words I’ve ever read in my entire life. I say jumble of words because I can’t even willfully call this a book. I only even read this in the first place because I’m working through Rory Gilmore’s reading list and I wish I had thrown this in the garbage after the first chapter. I miss the person I was before I read this book. This guy seems like the worst scum to ever set foot on earth. If I met this guy in public I would probably employ my pepper spray and my taser. He’s extremely disgusting, perverted, narcissistic, stupid, I could go on and on. This book is a whole lot of self righteous and incessant rambling interspersed with horrifyingly vile and nasty sex scenes. Absolutely hated this, holy crap.

Henry Miller is a skilled, intelligent and creative writer. His philosophy of art and social criticism are relevant for the 30 year old struggling artist he depicts and is beautifully written, as is his self-analysis and criticism. His alleged sexual exploits are unfortunate. Usually sexual literature does not bother me. However, this time, I took exception. I believe Miller’s self-doubt caused him to feel an obsessive need to relate his imagined, or real, sexual escapades and abuse ad nauseam. He had something to prove to himself and his readers. It was not art he was sharing, it was his immaturity. It is my hope that, over time, Miller self-actualized and wrote Nexus and Plexus with more self-respect and full use of his illustrious, imaginative writing faculties. Outside of this mild rebuke (humor), I do enjoy his writing and will continue to explore his work.