Tropic of Cancer audiobook

This may be the greatest book ever written. This opening passage proves it: "I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought I was an artist. I no longer think about it. I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse.... To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordian, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing."

What is writer’s internal world? What is writer’s external world?One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard.Henry Miller’s both worlds – inner and outer – are bleak and almost uninhabitable.The narration seems to be a cacophony of words portraying the chaos of events then slowly out of this chaos the grim music is being born – a surreal symphony of living low.Tropic of Cancer is poetry – the downbeat poesy of blind alleys.Still prowling around. Mid afternoon. Guts rattling. Beginning to rain now. Notre-Dame rises tomblike from the water. The gargoyles lean far out over the lace façade. They hang there like an idée fixe in the mind of a monomaniac. An old man with yellow whiskers approaches me. Has some Jaworski nonsense in his hand. Comes up to me with his head thrown back and the rain splashing in his face turns the golden sands to mud. Bookstore with some of Raoul Dufy's drawings in the window. Drawings of charwomen with rosebushes between their legs. A treatise on the philosophy of Joan Miró. The philosophy, mind you!Paris is a cradle of arts. Paris is an academy of creative thought. And Henry Miller is there like a selfish fetus in the monstrous Gothic womb passing through a necessary gestation.He who walks his own path, arrives at his own place…

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally. Sorry; the last paragraph today gets cut off a few sentences early!)The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the labelBook #20: Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller (1934)The story in a nutshell:Like many of the other novels to first become commercial hits under the moniker of "Modernism" (see, for example, past CCLaP-100 title Mrs Dalloway from the same period), Henry Miller's infamously raunchy Tropic of Cancer from 1934 doesn't bother to concern itself much with traditional plot or a traditional three-act structure, but is rather an attempt to capture the details of a particular moment in history in as intense a way as possible, using not only humorous anecdotal tales but also the brand-new literary technique known as "stream of consciousness." And man, what a period of history to capture -- based on Miller's own experiences from half a decade before, the novel is set in Paris in the years after World War One, a time when most young people had turned permanently cynical and nihilistic, horrified as they rightly were over what exact carnage humans had proven themselves capable of, now that humans had added mechanized industry (trains, machine guns, biological weapons) to the business of war. Add to this that the US itself had still not established its own global-class artistic community (which wouldn't happen until New York's Greenwich Village after World War Two), and you're left with the situation Miller describes with such black humor here -- of entire Parisian neighborhoods become boisterous, drunken melting pots, packed to the gills with bohemians from around the world who no longer give a crap about anything, who embrace such things as casual sex and exotic drugs in a way no other generation had embraced them before, as they party their way to the apocalypse they were all sure was right around the corner. Multiply by 300 pages, and you basically have Miller's book.The argument for it being a classic:There are two basic arguments over why Tropic of Cancer should be considered a classic, starting with the book itself: It is, after all, a shining example of early Modernism, the exact kind of radical departure from the flowery Victorian style that so many young artists were embracing back then, here done in a mature and self-assured way that builds on the literary experiments of the previous twenty years, but that finally makes it palatable for the first time to the general reading audience (and by "palatable" I mean "not incomprehensible," thank you very MUCH James Freaking Joyce). As such, its fans say, the novel should be rightly celebrated for the literary masterpiece it is; one of those rare books that gets stream-of-consciousness exactly right, one of those rare books that perfectly shows the combination of arrogance and self-hatred that mixes in the warm dysfunctional heart of any true bohemian. Ah, but see, in this case there's an entirely different second reason why this should be considered a classic; because for those who don't know, thirty years after its initial publication in Europe, this was one of the landmark artistic projects of the 1960s to help finally lift the yoke of government censorship in America, one of the first projects used by the courts to help define was exactly is and isn't "obscene," adding immense fuel to the countercultural fire that was going on in this country at the same time. If it wasn't for Tropic of Cancer, fans say, we would still have the all-or-nothing paradigm of the Hays Code in the arts, instead of the "put out what you want and we'll give it a rating" paradigm of our present day; no matter what you think of the book itself, they argue, this alone is a reason to consider it a classic.The argument against:Like many of the titles in the CCLaP 100 series (see The Catcher in the Rye, for example), the main argument against Tropic of Cancer seems to be the "What Hath God Wrought" one; that is, the book itself may not be that bad, but it legitimized something that should've never been legitimized, in this case whiny confessional stream-of-consciousness rants from broke artists in their twenties living in big cities, complaining for 300 pages about how unfair life is and how all the prostitutes keep falling in love with them. Yep, it was Tropic of Cancer that started all that, critics claim; and anytime you come across yet another sad little blog about how the heart of the city beats in the weary soul of some overeducated, entitled slacker, that's one more time we should visit the grave of Miller and pee all over it, in retribution for him creating a situation where such blogs are encouraged in the first place. Again, it's not so much that people complain about the book being awful on its own (although some will definitely argue that stream-of-consciousness has always been a house of cards, difficult to make work well within a literary project); it's more that the book simply isn't great, and should've never gotten the accolades and attention it did, with Miller being damn lucky that he had as exciting a sex life as he did at the exact moment in history that he did, along with the shamelessness to write it all down.My verdict:So as will very rarely be the case here at the CCLaP 100, let me admit that this is one of the few books of the series I've actually read before; in fact, much more than that, it was one of the books I practically worshipped in my early twenties as a snotty, overeducated, oversexed artist myself, a book that had a bigger impact on both my artistic career and just how I lived my life in general back then than probably any other single project you could mention. So needless to say I was a bit biased going into this week's essay; I not only consider Tropic of Cancer a classic, but easily among the top-10 of all the books in this series, one of those books that any restless young person of any generation should immediately gravitate towards starting around their 18th or 19th birthday. And that's because Miller is so good here, so damn good, at perfectly capturing that restlessness that comes with any generation of young, dissatisfied creatives -- that sense that they want to do something important, that they should be doing something important, just that none of them know how to do that important thing, so instead let that passion seep out through their sex lives, their clothing choices, the bands they listen to, etc. Tropic of Cancer is all about yearning, all about grasping life to the fullest you possibly can, not for the sake of simply doing so but rather because this is the only way you'll ever find what you're truly seeking. Or as MIller himself puts it: "I can't get it out of my mind what a discrepancy there is between ideas and living."But that all said, let me just plainly warn you -- whoo man, is this a filthy book, with it unbelievably enough still just as able to shock and offend as when it first came out. And again, I see this as an asset and strength of Miller as an author; because ultimately it's not really the language itself that has gotten people so upset about this book over the decades (you'll hear worse in most Hollywood hard-R sex comedies), but rather that Miller embraces a prurient attitude throughout, one that plainly addresses the cold realities about sex which are not usually discussed in polite company. Just take, for example, the chapter where he compares for the reader the various young artsy prostitutes who live in his neighborhood; of how the best ones are the ones who have come to grips with the fact that they're whores and not wives or girlfriends, and therefore lustily embrace the exact disgusting acts that wives and girlfriends won't, the main reason men visit prostitutes in the first place. Yeah, not for delicate sensibilities, this one is; despite it being almost 75 years old now, you should still exercise caution before jumping into it feet-first.And then finally, re-reading it this week for the first time since college two decades ago, I've realized something else about this book; that it's not just the fun little stories of crazy sex and urban living that Miller gets right, but also the more somber reflections of perpetual poverty, of the almost existential dread that can develop when waking up in the morning and not knowing how you're going to eat that day. This is the flip-side of the crazy bohemian life, something plainly there in Tropic of Cancer but that most people don't see when first reading it, or when reading it at a young age; that to live a life rejecting middle-class conformity and embracing chaos is not just endless evenings of absinthe and oral sex, that there's a very real price to pay for rejecting all these things as well, the price of health and kids and normal relationships and any kind of slow building one could potentially do in their chosen career. Let's not ever forget that the things Miller talks about in Tropic of Cancer happened half a decade before his literary career ever really took off, years where basically none of them got anything accomplished at all except to definitively list all the kinds of books they didn't want to write; let's also never forget that Miller's life got dramatically more boring after his literary career took off, busy as he suddenly was with...you know, writing all those books. The artistic life can be...

Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer is a novel by Henry Miller, It was first published in 1934 by the Obelisk Press in Paris, France. Miller gave the following explanation of why the book's title was Tropic of Cancer: "It was because to me cancer symbolizes the disease of civilization, the endpoint of the wrong path, the necessity to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch."تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و پنجم ماه می سال 2016 میلادیعنوان: مدار راس السرطان؛ هنری میلر؛ مترجم: سهیل سمی؛ تهران، ققنوس، 1394، در 391ص؛ شابک: 9789643117832؛ چاپ دوم 1395؛ شابک 9789643117831؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان امریکایی - سده 20مهنری میلر، از نویسندگان نام آشنای سده ی بیستم میلادی است؛ کتاب نخستین بار در سال 1934میلادی در «پاریس» منتشر شد، و نخستین کتابی بود که «میلر»، پس از سفرشان به اروپا نوشتند؛ کتابیکه نخبگان و نویسندگان بسیاری آنرا ستوده اند؛ «هنری میلر» در این کتاب، زندگی خویش را دستمایه قرار می‌دهند، و داستان می‌نویسند؛ «میلر» در آمریکا، و در بلندای ناداری، دست به: گورکنی، کارگری، و خیابانگردی نیز میزنند و ...؛تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 22/03/1399هجری خورشیدی ا. شربیانی

When I read this for the first time I thought the world was opening up and eating people. I wanted to get drunk and go on a hooker spree, to move to Paris and generally debauch for the rest of my 20's....Then I realized I kind of wanted to do all this anyways but with Miller's aid I could and even better I could disguise the whole thing as "literary." I struggled through Capricorn, through The Books in My Life, through a number of Miller's personal letters and musings. I even made a pilgrimage to Big Sur. Then I picked up Richard Brautigan or "Cannary Row" or something and I realized I could skip Paris. I could skip Europe entirely. I could just drink wine on a bench in my back yard, throw on an old Bill Broonzy CD and stare at the sun. I could even meet a nice girl and keep her around for a while. No need for crabs or lice or bed bugs at all. No sir, just soft northern california sunlight and grassy knolls. That was it. The dirty big city Miller hangovers were gone.....Still, for a few months there, Miller was really really doing it for me. At the time it was true life changing stuff.5 stars.

GoodReads Memorial Plot Summary (Pages 1 - 30) (Warning: Contains Spoilers) (Sponsor: Grove Press)We are living (view spoiler)[in Montparnasse (hide spoiler)]/(view spoiler)[at the Villa Borghese (hide spoiler)]/(view spoiler)[in Rue Bonaparte (hide spoiler)].We walk down streets where (view spoiler)[Zola (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[Balzac (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[Dante/ (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[Strindberg (hide spoiler)] lived.The cancer of (view spoiler)[the weather (hide spoiler)]/(view spoiler)[time (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[poverty (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[anarchy (hide spoiler)] is eating us away.The atmosphere is saturated with (view spoiler)[decay/ (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[disaster (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[frustration (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[futility (hide spoiler)].(view spoiler)[Boris (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[Moldorf (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[Borowski (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[Sylvester (hide spoiler)] discovers his room is plagued by (view spoiler)[lice (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[cockroaches (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[dungbeatles (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[dragonflies/ (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[bedbugs (hide spoiler)]. He asks me to (view spoiler)[scratch (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[shave (hide spoiler)] his armpits.This (view spoiler)[journal (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[novel (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[collection of fragmentary notes (hide spoiler)] is a prolonged (view spoiler)[insult to (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[kick in the pants of (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[God (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[Art (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[Man (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[Destiny (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[Time (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[Love/ (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[Beauty (hide spoiler)].You, (view spoiler)[Tania (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[Irene (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[Mona (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[Llona (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[Elsa (hide spoiler)] are my (view spoiler)[chaos (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[fever (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[fire (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[passion (hide spoiler)].I am (view spoiler)[qunt-struck/ (hide spoiler)] (view spoiler)[a handful (hide spoiler)].I know how to (view spoiler)[inflame (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[fill (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[iron out every wrinkle in (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[shoot hot bolts into (hide spoiler)] your (view spoiler)[qunt (hide spoiler)] with my (view spoiler)[dick (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[putz (hide spoiler)](view spoiler)[erection (hide spoiler)].The Pornographic ImaginationHenry Miller wrote "Tropic of Cancer" between 1930 and 1934. It was published in France in 1934, though it wasn't published in the United States until 27 years later in 1961.The importation of the French edition was immediately banned. Only when it was published locally did the Supreme Court determine (in 1964, before the 60’s had truly begun to swing) that the work was not obscene.The Right Sexual ProportionsThe definition of obscenity requires a work to have an undue emphasis on or exploitation of sex.The word "undue" implies that there is an appropriate level of emphasis or exploitation."Tropic of Cancer" is littered with words that, in order not to offend, I will paraphrase as "cocque", "qunt" and "fucque". Let’s assume that life is 80% tedium (e.g., work) and 20% sex. Should there be a criminal law that says that 20% sex is OK, but 80% will send you to jail?Is it wrong that "Tropic of Cancer" might be much closer to the life of the imagination?I think any subject matter should be fair game in fiction written by adults for adults.However, regardless, I think "Tropic of Cancer" deserves its place as one of the master works of the twentieth century.The Truth Told Truly"Tropic of Cancer" recounts the narrator’s first two years in Paris after leaving New York in 1930.Nothing is to be gained by denying that the novel is autobiographical.It contains the following epigraph from Ralph Waldo Emerson:"These novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies – captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences and how to record truth truly."It’s implicit that Henry Miller’s quest was to tell the truth about his own life "truly".There is no attempt to self-censor or to beautify. Everything is revealed. A Fucquing CatalogueThe male characters in "Tropic of Cancer" are largely American expatriates, would be writers or artists, living in Paris, not necessarily gainfully employed, close to destitute, hungry for food and life experience, but with plenty of time on their hands.Understandably, they spend a lot of their time whoring and fucquing.It’s arguable that the amount of fucquing in the novel reflects what males would hope to do in similar circumstances. (In my younger days, we called it “college life”.)From a feminist point of view, the female characters are not presented in the same manner.None of them is portrayed as financially or emotionally independent. Most of them are the whores who are pursued by the males. Some transform from sex objects to love objects, but only in the short-term. The closest we get is Macha, an ostensible Russian Princess, who avoids sex by claiming to have the clap.To be fair to Miller, he isn’t the only one doing the fucquing. The chapters are essentially vignettes of the males, complete with the females who surround them.While research has identified Miller’s real life inspiration, there is still a possibility that Miller explores some of the options available to him, through these characters.Miller’s character still expects his wife Mona (June) to join him from New York. While he indulges in his fair share of whoring, he doesn’t form any close attachments, apart from those to the whore Germaine (who treats him “nobly”) and Tania, who is married to Sylvester (based on the real life characters Bertha Schrank and Joseph Schrank).TaniaDespite her marital status, Tania is closest to replacing Mona in Miller’s heart and is the true inspiration for the account in the novel:"It is to you, Tania, that I am singing. I wish that I could sing better, more melodiously, but then perhaps you would never have consented to listen to me. You have heard the others sing and they have left you cold. They sang too beautifully, or not beautifully enough."Tania’s appeal seems to be that she accepts him as he is. In return, Miller must accept her for what she is, married, but available.Miller’s financial circumstances hardly diminish his sexual braggadocio (for he is an artist):"O Tania, where now is that warm qunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your qunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and your womb turned inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a qunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent...I am fucquing you, Tania, so that you’ll stay fucqued."Henry knows or asserts that he is better for Tania than her husband, because of his sexual prowess and his superior writing skills. Well, it’s his story after all and he’s sticking to it.Miller asks us to judge him by his performance, and his novel, his story-telling, is just as much a part of his performance as his fucquing ability.This is the most sexually explicit and declamatory that Miller gets in relation to his own affairs. If you can handle this passage, you will have no problem with the rest of the novel.This Dry, Fucqued Out, Lucked Out World in Which We’re LivingMiller was writing at a time when the First World War had just occurred and the Second World War was fast approaching.Miller was not a particularly political person, in the sense of party political or ideological commitment to Left or Right. In 1936, he would tell George Orwell that to go to Spain at the time of the Spanish Civil War, would be "the act of an idiot".However, Miller believed that there were problems affecting the roots of civilization.The West was in decline. It was gazing into an abyss. In Miller’s words, it was "fucqued out".Initially, he realises this while whoring:"When I look down into this fucqued-out qunt of a whore, I feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished like a leper’s skull..."The world is pooped out: there isn't a dry fart left. Who that has a desperate, hungry eye can have the slightest regard for these existent governments, laws, codes, principles, ideals, ideas, totems, and taboos? "If anyone knew what it meant to read the riddle of that thing which today is called a "crack" or a "hole," if anyone had the least feeling of mystery about the phenomena which are labeled "obscene," this world would crack asunder. "It is the obscene horror, the dry, fucked-out aspect of things which makes this crazy civilization look like a crater."The Topic of CancerMiller describes the eschatological in terms of the scatological and then in terms of cancer:"No matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon."The world around me is dissolving, leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away…"[It] grows inside you like a cancer, and grows and grows until you are eaten away by it."Miller even explained the name of the novel in these terms:"It was because to me cancer symbolizes the disease of civilization, the endpoint of the wrong path, the necessity to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch."The Estrangement of the MachineAt the heart of Miller’s diagnosis are industrialization and the machine.At a personal level, his machine was his typewriter, with which he had a harmonious relationship:"I am a writing machine. The last screw has been added. The thing flows. Between me and the machine there is no estrangement. I am the machine…"In contrast, he refers to a "world which is peculiar to the big cities, the world of men and women whose last drop of juice has been squeezed out by the machine – the martyrs of modern progress…a mass of bones and collar buttons…"Industrialisation relies on the division of labour and conformity.Citing Walt Whitman, he asserts:"The future belongs to the machine, to the robots."We have been deprived of our humanity by mechanization.Paradoxically, Miller associates the word "human" with this new de-humanised human being:"Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I am proud to say that I am inhuman, that I belong not to men and governments, that I have nothing to do with creeds and principles. I have nothing to do with the creaking machinery of humanity.""I Am Inhuman!"Something new is required, what Miller calls "inhuman".Miller doesn’t recognise any obligation to define himself or his vision in traditional liberal, humanist terms.Again, he embraces imagery that recalls "Hamlet" and William Blake:"I belong to the earth! ... I am inhuman! "I say it with a mad, hallucinated grin, and I will keep on saying it though it rain crocodiles. Behind my words are all those grinning, leering, skulking skulls, some dead and grinning a long time, some grinning as if they had lockjaw, some grinning with the grimace of a grin, the foretaste and aftermath of what is always going on. "Clearer than all I see my own grinning skull, see the skeleton dancing in the wind, serpents issuing from the rotted tongue and the bloated pages of ecstasy slimed with excrement. "And I join my slime, my excrement, my madness; my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh. "All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on endlessly through the minds of those to come in the inexhaustible vessel that contains the history of the race."Miller is content to join (Blakean) ecstasy with shit and slime and vomit and madness.Creative Spirits and Mothers of the RaceMiller believes that civilization has become a "crater", a "great yawning gulf of nothingness":"The dry, fucqued-out crater is obscene. More obscene than anything is inertia. More blasphemous than the bloodiest oath is paralysis."Nothingness must be confronted by something vital, dynamic and exuberant. This is the role of sex and of creativity, but it is also the role of womanhood in Miller’s vision.The problem of, and the response to, nothingness is carried between the legs of "the creative spirits and mothers of the race," the latter being the "tenderest parts" of womanhood."The Inhuman Ones"The "inhuman ones" are "artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song."It is the role of artists to transcend life and lifelessness by:"…ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals...""The Womb of Time"The other response to nothingness is womanhood.Miller has a complicated relationship with womanhood, which needs to be approached with some skepticism, because that was the response of his contemporaries.Womanhood for Miller represents the womb, the origin of life and a comfort zone and a source of sustenance during gestation (as in George Orwell’s essay, the experience of being "inside the whale").Womanhood represents a contrast to the order of industrialization and mechanization. It represents chaos:"When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn, chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written. "You, Tania, are my chaos. It is why I sing. "It is not even I, it is the world dying, shedding the skin of time. I am still alive, kicking in your womb, a reality to write upon."Miller’s Boner FidesObviously, the womb or uterus is a discrete part of a female’s genitalia from which males derive pleasure.Miller seeks to exalt or deify a woman’s vagina or qunt, by virtue of its association with the metaphorical significance of the womb.This is the foundation upon which Miller builds an entire sexual and worldly philosophy.The question is: is this philosophy sincere or authentic, or is he simply dressing up his sexual appetite into something that is ostensibly more profound?Lust for LifeFor Miller, sex is the measure of the man, right down, in his case at least (or at most), to his length in inches.However, his sexual exuberance is symbolic, in turn, of his lust or zest for life.This zest necessarily takes him, a male, into the arms and womb of womanhood.What Miller seeks from the relationship between male and female is joy, "the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns":"Today I awoke from a sound sleep with curses of joy on my lips…Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy."Feel FlowsMiller incorporates this vitality into a theory about the flow of life from birth to death, from womb to tomb: "I love everything that flows…rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag..."I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco…"I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund."Again, Miller’s vision incorporates both positive and negative, semen and menstrual blood, fecund and unfecund.In language that adverts to Proust, Miller continues:"I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution. "The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now."The positive and the negative are the yin and the yang, two sides of the same coin, parts of a cyclical continuum from birth to death to rebirth in some lesser or higher form. Miller felt unable to write literature like Proust, as if it had ceased to be relevant to the time, as if Proust was a force that needed an equal and opposite reaction:"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive..."I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me…"This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty…what you will."The Body ElectricPerhaps the greatest literary influence on Miller was Walt Whitman.In many ways, Miller is a personification of Whitman’s worldview, which cannot be found in Europe:"Europe is saturated with art and her soil is full of dead bones and her museums are bursting with plundered treasures, but what Europe has never had is a free, healthy spirit, what you might call a MAN… Goethe is an end of something, Whitman is a beginning."What appeals to Miller about Whitman was his emphasis on the body, sex and vitality:"Ideas have to be wedded to action; if there is no sex, no vitality in them, there is no action. Ideas cannot exist alone in the vacuum of the mind. Ideas are related to living..."Equally, Miller’s life and work must be authentic and true:"I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing…"To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing. It is to you, Tania, that I am singing." Anais Nin Anais Nin said that "Tropic of Cancer" was "a wild extravagance, a mad gaiety, a verve, a gusto, at times almost a delirium. A continual oscillation between extremes…it is blood and flesh which are given us. "Drink, food, laughter, desire, passion, curiosity, the simple realities which nourish the roots of our highest and vaguest creations."It is to her enormous credit that, not only did she provide this preface for Miller’s work, but that she borrowed a substantial amount of money to fund its publishing costs.For much of the time that Miller was writing the novel, she also had a passionate sexual relationship with him. There is even some suspicion that aspects of their relationship are reflected in the character of Tania, even though there is evidence of the primary inspiration for that character.Regardless of whether she features in the novel, we must be grateful to Nin that "Tropic of Cancer", a work of unrivalled sexual exuberance and exaltation, survives today in a world that is often unimaginative, uninspired, mundane and tedious.

“I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing.” This is definitely not one of those books which you take on your holidays to a sunny-side parks, get cozy, and read, as it contains extreme contents, acts, thoughts, and ideas which would leave you dumbfounded and deranged. There was no any usual forms of addressing "Women": it lacks "Ladies" and misses "Miss" (You get the idea, don't you?); There are also countless women who take a colloquial name by their anatomy. No Wonder this book was once banned for its obscenity, but later declared as otherwise.“This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will.” Henry himself takes us through the dark slippery streets crowded by Fifteen-Franc whores (pardon my French!), full of misfortune, ennui, grief, and suicide, of the bohemian French Capital city. It is easier, too easy to despise this heartless book as a mere diatribe. But you never know what you encounter in the dark corners of the midnight streets. Amidst the loud chaos and the silent syphilis, you will hear him loud and clear in his lowly tone his reflections on human conditioning which at times, might sound racial (But I doubt). There are no miracles or no microscopic vestige of relief but endless torment and misery of homeless and ever-hungry Henry, walking the plagued streets Franc-less in the Cancer of his time. Not for the weak ones!

In short, I think Tropic of Cancer is a masterwork. Do read it! However let me yield the floor to George Orwell who's done far more thinking about the novel than I -- from his essay "Inside the Whale."http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartb...

This may be one of the best books in the American cannon, and also, unfortunately, one of the most underrated. I read a lot of the reviews on the book before writing this and I found not very many that were thought out. I recall one reviewer giving up on the book because the "frenetic style was tiresome." Usually when someone has feelings like that, it is because they don't understand the literature and so their mind wanders. Another review noted that Miller's supposed "shock tactics" were outdated. Miller never meant to shock people, that is in your head. If you read the opening quote by Emerson, it states something to the effect that telling a true story about yourself is something near to impossible, this is Miller's attempt at doing that. He pulls no punches on the everyday vernacular that he must have used and imagined. This makes the story not only authentic, but also compelling. Miller's mix of philosophy and the impressionistic portrait that he paints of Paris make for a challenging and gorgeous read. Like Whitman, Miller finds beauty in all things and despite atrocious circumstances, he finds the will and the hope to enjoy his freedom. His style cries Whitman with its use of many objects to describe a single scene or feeling, but he has a different touch than Whitman that allows for the darker underbelly of human life that we so often discard because we lack the ability to understand the parts of ourselves that we have been taught to be shamed by. A must read for those who have read Whitman and really love him. Great companions to this book are: Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and Charriere's "Papillon."

“When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written.” This is one of those amazing books that does violence to your system (think Lolita, Naked Lunch, Ulysses) but still leaves you gobsmacked by its brilliance. IT is the brazen, tortured soul of a man going through an existential crises in Paris. The novel is a cry in the dark; a delirious shout in the void. Miller's prose dances on the edge of the cracked mirror of Modernism. It is dazzling, sharp and extremely dangerous. This is NOT a novel for the weak, the timid, the easily shocked or those that believe art exists without shadows. Miller lifts the sheets and describes the decay, the despair and the rot of humanity. If you are not prepared for the monstrous vision of Miller you won't be able to find the roses in the dung heap, and thus you will be unable to question your own desire for roses in the first place.

I suppose it is a difficult book. Not in terms of language but what Miller is trying to achieve through this novel. One has to pay attention. Else, one might dismiss it after a few pages. One must read it slowly before jumping to quick conclusions. I understand why this book got so much flak. Very often people condemn a book without reading it or not reading it properly. In fact, there are also moments where I too got annoyed by the author's 'in your face' style. But there is much in it that I liked as well. In fact, I understood his rage. At one point in the book, he describes himself as a lean and hungry Hyena who is all set to sink his teeth into life. The book has no conventional story-line. In other words, the story begins where everything ends. His contempt for life, love, politics is so extreme that it almost borders on madness. I cannot believe that anyone can read this book without feeling a bit annoyed and disturbed. The book is not written to please anyone. It exposes what is rotten with his times, or probably at all times. The book has a remarkable contemporary feel. Some description of Paris of the time resonates with the contemporary destruction of Syria. While France and Syria might be very different places in terms of their respective aesthetics, the destruction, however, envelops that difference.The book has been fiercely criticized for its explicit sexual content. I guess all his descriptions of sex, use of 'provocative' words such as erection, cunt, penis is quite mechanical. Sexual boldness reveals aggression against war. His descriptions reveal a sense of dissatisfaction, emptiness, ennui and some sort existential void. The sexual descriptions are mostly bizarre and bawdy but they are never porn-like; his words, for instance, do not excite imagination the way D. H Lawrence's text does. One does not look forward to those descriptions, nor does one lament or lose interest when sexually explicit scenes end. In other words, the book does not provide cheap thrills. I often hear that the author is a woman-hater. As far as I understood him, he just hates aspects of life over which he has no control such as war and ever-lurking presence of death. The sepulchral, dingy climate of the time, obsession with (fe)male genitals, and at times his hatred for everything alludes more to what is rotting in society, and not intended at women. He may have a strange approach to sex, but his take on life is even stranger and immensely provocative. And for good reasons.Once Henry Miller remarked to her friend, Anais Nin, that he takes goodness in people for granted. He expects people to be decent. It is the abnormal, the cruel, the unusual that fascinates him.How can one, then, write about the abnormal in a normal language! I guess his style is necessary to his content.

Tropic of Cancer first published in 1934 in France, but this edition was banned in the United States until 1961.Tropic of Cancer is one of the most important and beautiful pieces of prose in the history of English literature, It isn't an ordinary novel, it's Miller's life in pairs, how he sees his friends, how he thinks about human being's big questions. What Miller is doing only is searching for food and if he finds it then he can give a "lay" and write some pages in his novel.In this beautiful prose we can't imagine completely his friends but we clearly know how Miller saw them, Many of his discussions are almost a nonsense except when he talking about literature, and his idea about becoming an inhuman instead of a human was the most brilliant one.This novel is a good example of the real literature which starts and ends with the language, It isn't possible to read a great novel which isn't written in a beautiful language, classic or modern or post-modern, realistic or surreal, love, action or thriller novel, the language is the most important thing.Talking about the language and the literature, i want to refer to a remarkable cross-purposes use of a word in two novels, in atonement we read the word "c***" for one time and the use of this word was the key of the whole plot of the novel, and the reader is suppose to feel its vulgarity. Here in tropic of cancer we read it hundreds of time, it's even means women in Miller's language and the reader suppose to feel it as an ordinary word.The novel not suitable for the morally conservative readers.الترجمة العربية للرواية - قرأتها منذ عدة أعوام - بواسطة أسامة منزلجي جيدة على مستوى نقل روح العمل إلى حد كبير ولكنها بالطبع لا تنقل جمال لغة ميللر.الرواية غير مناسبة للقراء المؤمنين بمفهوم الأدب النظيف بتاتاً, فميللر يستخدم الكلمات الواقعية التي قد تثير حفيظة القارىء أحياناً, خاصة عند نقلها للعربية.

If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.

The Tropic of Cancer, Wikipedia says, "also referred to as the Northern tropic, is the circle of latitude on the Earth that marks the most northerly position at which the Sun may appear directly overhead at its zenith. This event occurs once per year, at the time of the June solstice, when the Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun to its maximum extent."The sun at its zenith, that is, in its full splendour, “tropic” being the word of reference here.On the other hand, Henry Miller emphasizes the second word when he explains the title of his novel as follows: "It was because to me cancer symbolizes the disease of civilization, the endpoint of the wrong path, the necessity to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch.” The phrase becomes thus slightly oxymoronic and can be read as a metaphor of Paris. Indeed, the City is the main character of this extraordinary book: Paris, shining like the sun at its zenith when it promises the grandeur to the young artist who enters it, but revealing itself as an incurable disease while the same artist actually begins to live in it. Published in 1934 in Paris (where else?), the novel triggered a huge scandal because of its language and nonconformist approach to some taboo themes at that time, especially those related to sex. Prohibited in USA and UK for many years (three decades!) because of the same old confusion between ethics and aesthetics that seems to lead to many an absurd and funny interpretation of art works even nowadays, considered immoral and obscene, it is fortunate it did not become a book only to read about instead of a book to enjoy reading. Especially when, as Samuel Beckett once said, it is one of the greatest modernist writings in the universal literature. And in a truly modernist way the novel begins, by considering Literature dead and its writer a forgotten, otiose God ("Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God."), to replace them with a spitting artist who scoffs at the old values without the ambition to create new ones ("This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty…"). A book without a narrative line, following the stream of consciousness of the narrator, who records his time in Paris with his bohemian friends, in order to capture - what? The condition of the Artist, always looking for something very "trivial", like food, shelter or sex? The contrast between living and creating? The mirage of the City? All of them and more, in order to stress the idea that life creeps into the creation, that there is nothing you have to remove from Art as non-artistic or prohibitive, not even the crap, the clap, the cunt, the syphilis, the whores and so on. In a book destined to be "absolutely original, absolutely perfect," whose theme is the Artist and his Creation, there is nothing that cannot be told or have to be avoided. The Narrator himself is merely a man who struggles and makes many mistakes as a human being, who steals from a prostitute and deceives his friends, but he is also the Artist that observes the world and gives us a fair image of it. It is not a coherent image in the beginning, but a puzzle whose pieces are thrown negligently towards the reader:- Fulgurant visions of some characters, masterfully evoked in a few words, like Van Norden, suggestively characterized as "cunt-struck"; or Moldorf compared with a "vase without a rubber plant" (note this: not a plant, a rubber one!); or Fanny, who laughs like a fat worm (how the heck do worms laugh? – like Fanny, of course!); or Claude who "had a soul and a conscience; she had refinement, too, which is bad – in a whore"; or Kepi who "has absolutely no ambition except to get a fuck every night"; or count Waldemar von Schwisseneinzug who has dandruff eyes (imagine this, if you can).- Ironic notes about food or the lack of it - there is a whole page where almost every word is a synonym or reminder of food (lunch, belly, eat, meal, chicken, plate, vegetable, etc.) to end with the upside-down image of the City as a huge organism eaten by disease.- Description, in a tone that later will be equalled only by Bukowski, of the menial jobs the narrator has to get in order to survive: as a proof-reader, when the narrator realizes, ironically, that "It requires more concentration to detect a missing comma than to epitomize Nietzsche's philosophy. You can be brilliant sometimes, when you're drunk, but brilliance is out of place in the proofreading department. Dates, fractions, semicolons – these are the things that count"; as a fake journalist - pseudonymous writing in newspapers; as an English teacher, when he tries to spice the students’ classes with the subject of the coupling of the elephants.- Tragic-comic scenes: Carl tries to seduce a rich old woman but he cannot stomach to have sex with her; the proof-reader Peckover is gravely hurt in an accident but he can only think about the loss of his false teeth; the narrator steals the hundred francs he had paid a Norwegian whore for services rendered; and the icing on the cake (yours to guess the scene behind the quote if you didn’t read the book): "Imagine these bloody no-accounts going home from the concert with blood on their dickies!"Above all this there is the intriguing love-hate relationship between the narrator and the City, since Paris is viewed like a huge organism that traps, enchants, promises and deceives: a stage, an obstetrical instrument used for artificial birth, a place where everyone lives and no one dies; a heart palpitating after being removed from a warm body; an illusion of being at home; a paradise in the spring, a place for varieties of sexual provender; something that "grows inside you like a cancer"; a mad slaughterhouse, the navel of the world, more eternal than Rome or Nineveh; a whore that " from a distance (…) seems ravishing, you can't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. " Because "one can live without friends, as one can live without love, or even without money, that supposed sine qua non. One can live in Paris – I discovered that! – on just grief and anguish."Of course, in such a desecrated world the Artist’s epiphanies are Miller-style: When I look down into this fucked-out cunt of a whore I feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished like a leper's skull.

4 Stars for Tropic of Cancer (audiobook) by Henry Miller read by Ian McShane. This was a interesting story. But I’m sure I would have never read it if it hadn’t been banned when it was first published. I find it fascinating to see where society has drawn the line and band certain books.