Tropic of Cancer

A foul-mouthed exploration of 1930s literary hipsterism in Paris. Miller rails against everything and nothing in particular in a cowardly-rebel-without-a-cause romp through whorehouses and hotels in Montparnasse. MIller describes it best himself. "A man... must stand up on the high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. And anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad. less intoxicated, less contaminating, is not art." Well, the gibberish part is dead on. Tropic of Cancer is 300 pages of an aesthetic-snob mad with existential forlornness howling at the moon. It's like reading The Scream. Dostoyevsky said it the most cleverly, Sartre said it the most clearly, and Miller said it the loudest and most coarsely. The only thing interesting about this book is the depth and breadth of Miller's egoism.

And to think that I was annoyed year after year cause Miller's books weren't available on the Amazon Kindle store.So when I finally got Tropic of Cancer in a different format ... it was too late for me to enjoy it. Too late as I've already read Bukowski, Hemingway, Thompson so I know that there's, if not many for sure, a handful of authors capable of telling more with less, and do so while exploring the dark underbelly of the world. Nah, too late cause this is 2016 and western society is to far along to be left open-mouthed by tales of vanilla sex or abject poverty.So bored by his interminable descriptions that led nowhere I left this book half finished and I feel no remorse.

The first time I read this, I was 16/17. I read it for all the reasons you'd imagine someone that age would read it. I didn't believe I was allowed to have an opinion at the time because I was wise enough to know I didn't know anything. Over the years, my brain has randomly conjured up scenes from this book--often enough to compel a reread. Orwell describes it best: "[A]nd even if parts of it disgust you, it will stick in your memory..." I was disgusted and I remembered it.

Though I only "liked it," I think four stars is a more appropriate rating because I can imagine that I might have "really liked it" had I read it earlier in my life. It certainly has its powerful moments, but it has largely lost its ability to shock with so much imitation in contemporary literature. Honestly, in my estimation, Miller is a better writer than Burroughs, Bukowski, and all of the Beat writers (especially Kerouac), but his strange obsession with Jews and woefully clichéd misogyny are glaring examples of how his worldview hasn't aged well. I'm sure Paris in the early 1930s was a great place to observe the "wound which is man," but his diatribes grew tiresome and the writing wasn't enough to bolster over 300 pages. On the whole, I'm thankful for this novel, if only for its role as a forebear for Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, a novel with similar themes more artfully delivered.

Read this nearly fifteen years ago, but barely remembered it. The surrealist style doesn't do much for me, but it's a nice portrait of the drinking and whoring ex-patriate crowd in Paris during the early 1930s (after the big names of ten years earlier had moved on). Also, it's a nice sketch of the sort of people who eagerly signed up to fight Franco a few years after this was published.

I'm giving this only 3 stars because there's no actual plot. It could be a memoir; it's definitely not a traditionally organized novel. That was a point in its favor during the surrealist and early Modernist movement, but it's essentially Kerouac 25 years early.

The GLBT note is mainly due to a supporting character (from Idaho) proclaiming his desperate, undying love for a young (apparently teenage) boy back home. The other men don't think it's possible for a man to fall in love with another man, but their friend ignores their scorn. There are quite a lot of homoerotic situations and men being naked around each other (and sharing whores together), but these scenes lack the rich detail that the rest of the book has and I wonder if Miller was self-censoring or if it was a publisher's decision.

This novel was published in 1934 in Paris and banned from sale or import to the US. Its first US publication in 1961 caused a groundbreaking Supreme Court obscenity trial.

I'm not going to say I liked this book. The protagonist is, by today's moral standards, quite vile. I certainly did not like him.

I admit, it took me longer than normal to 'get into' the book; initially I was reading it because I had set myself the task of reading it.

And at times, there were several pages of stream-of-consciousness rants that, to be quite frank, bored me.

But I can not deny that this is a brilliant piece of writing. At its best, in my opinion, when recounting tales of events, I found myself actually caring about what happened to the characters, even though I never liked any of them.

Though not a pleasant story, this is a superb depiction of a life lived in the seedier end of Paris society.

"Trainspotting" in Paris with Pernod instead of heroin. Unlikeable characters that don't -do- anything but the writing and antics are enough to keep you reading. Enjoyed it more upon the second reading.

Return this book to the vault.

I thought this fictionalized memoir was highly overrated, and mostly tedious. It is a tale of ex-pat Henry Miller's time in Paris - the people he meets, the money he spends, the places he stays, the books he reads, and the sex, sex, and more sex in which he participates. The prose is an erratic and meandering stream of consciousness, and I have to sheepishly admit that if it weren't for the gratuitous erotic sections and profanity, I would have stopped reading out of boredom. In saying all of this, the book DOES have great value and I still believe it to be worth reading. After being released in France in the 1930's, the novel was finally published in the United States in 1961 and promptly led to an obscenity trial. America's laws on pornography were tested, paving the way for future authors to do what they do best. For this reason, it is a truly important and landmark piece of literature and should be experienced, but don't expect too much.

Absolutely brilliant recording of a great, difficulty, offensive, and often very funny book

My God! What a waste of time. The only thing I can say for Henry Miller is that, occasionally, he showed that he had quite a vocabulary.

I don't get it, this book is so-so at best. Like "On the Road" this book is about a down and out guy who mooches his way through life. Ground breaking because he wrote this in the 30's ok. I can see why it was banned then, yet the story itself is not that great. Other than that it is unimpressive garbage. I didn't like the way Miller use French without interpreting it for us. So if you read it do it on a device that allows you to highlight and translate those sentences for you.

It's a good thing I'd read some Henry Miller and already knew what a horny toad he was before attacking this novel, so the general crudeness, irreverence and cynicism didn't exactly come as a shock. I do not know whether I could have appreciated this book had I read it at another time. It is bleak. It oozes sweat and blood and s**t. It forces us to face things we had rather put aside, ignore, pass by without looking back. That [Tropic of Cancer] was banned and was the cause for an obscenity trial when it was originally published in the United States in 1961 is hardly surprising. Aside from all that, I was amused with Miller's description of his first years in Paris as a struggling writer so poor, he never knew how he'd come by his next meal, yet somehow always had a little bit of change to have a go with whatever prostitute was at hand. Is it an autobiography? Not exactly. It it fiction? Sometimes. It is a stream of consciousness set free of any possible inhibition. It sometimes veers toward the big philosophical questions of man and the world we live in. Of more interest to me were the stories and anecdotes that 'he', or the writer who narrates the story, has experienced with various people he has come across. A few friends. Various employers. Countless prostitutes. Several generous hosts. There is nothing comforting to be found here. Women, which are often mentioned, are systematically referred to as c*nts. Our writer seems to have nothing but contempt for his friends and benefactors. But there is truth. Unvarnished, unadulterated, often very ugly, but absolute and complete candour of the kind that, even by today's standards shakes us out of any kind of complacency. One of my favourite parts of the book comes at the very beginning, when he gives us a general idea about what kind of experience we, the readers, are in for:"It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that 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.*There were times when I found Miller's conceit absolutely hilarious. There were times when I couldn't wait for him to move on to the next thing, or maybe do so myself. But I must say that what got me through it all was Campbell Scott's excellent narration in the audiobook version. He is impassive, neutral, with a gentle voice that helps smooth over some of the harshness. This was a most welcome quality in the parts where the filth of the places, people, faces, language, seemed to latch onto me too. I couldn't say I exactly loved this book, but I certainly see why it's considered such an important work of literature. Recommended? Yes. But you've been given fair warning. * This excerpt transcribed from the audiobook version and likely contains many inaccuracies, especially in the punctuation.

This book changed my life. Made me drop out of college and travel... changed the way I read, write, think. Miller's Masterpiece.

I read this on a recommendation from a friend. This was the first time in my life that I just couldn't bring myself to finish the book.

I read this in high school because it was supposed to be obscene and controversial, but didn't get much out of it at the time. Re-reading now to see where it stands in light of everything since. Relevant: "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 of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will." The first punk novel? Has many of the problems that dog me about the early punk years too, eg, rampant sexism and solipsism and Peter-Pan-ism and so on.

The prose is excellent, but the book has very little direction. I had no idea where Miller was pulling the characters, or to what purpose the sidestories served other than, "Man wouldn't it be terrible to live like this?" If Miller figured out some sort of plot, I think this book would've been a much more powerful read.

I decided to read Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” after watching “Henry and June” again after many years; the movie is excellent, and based on the Anais Nin book of the same name which describes Nin’s frolics in Paris with the bohemian Miller and his wife June. “Tropic of Cancer” is written as a log of Miller’s experiences and thoughts while living as a bachelor in Paris in the early 1930’s; he had left his wife back in America. I found the vagabond lifestyle he led and the style of his prose to be an interesting preview of Beat authors like Kerouac who would come twenty years later. It’s shocking to me that it was published in 1934, and with its graphic descriptions of sex it’s easy to see why it was banned until 1964 in America, and then only after a ruling by the Supreme Court. I coincidentally saw a reprint of highlighted news from the week of Dec. 12-17, 1961 in the San Francisco Chronicle, and included was the controversy surrounding this novel. “Garbage is garbage and dirt is dirt. .. A beast is a beast – this is bestial. It appeals to the bestial”, grumbled James W. Kirchanski. “An impressionable young man or woman who reads it probably would lose all ideals of the man-woman relationship.”, worried Albert E. Bagshaw, “It might even drive young men to shun women forever.” Miller eschews all things conventional: getting a “normal” job, the morality of the day, and appreciating history or past artists, with some exceptions to the latter: Whitman, who he admired for his joy and ecstasy, and Dostoevsky, who he admired for the rawness of his life and his emotions. Indeed, Miller eschews being what we call “human”. He wants to not only live in the now, but to be so true to his desires that he is living more like an animal, or perhaps better put, like a “natural” human, untainted by the artifices society has erected over thousands of years. Unfortunately a lot of the vagabond lifestyle degenerates to Miller and his cohorts getting drunk, having sex with whores, and trying to avoid contracting “the clap”. He is pretty blunt in objectifying women and calling them “cunts”, and in general is the absolute opposite of politically correct. Don’t read it if you’re easily offended, or if reading about this type of lifestyle is not interesting to you.Also, and perhaps naturally, in seeking autonomy from “the man” and complete freedom in his life, Miller’s issue is oftentimes finding friends who will provide him a place to live or an occasional meal. Don’t read it if you’re likely to judge him for being a “bum” and not getting a job like the rest of us poor shlubs. Do read it if you want to see life from a very different perspective. Miller lets it go, lets it rip, lets it fly. He’s not interested in editing, perfect prose, or trying to please people. What he wants to describe are honest, real, true feelings and experiences from a life lived off the beaten track, things that at the time were not spoken of. As he puts it, “There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books.” I admire his courage for leading the life in the way he did, fiercely and in the way he wanted to; after all, we only have one life to live and this is the time each of us owns. The book certainly held my attention. On the other hand, it’s hard to admire a lot of his actions so I’m a little conflicted, and his writing, while interesting, is not great, and I’m sure Miller himself would be the first to agree. Followed by telling me to go fuck myself. Quotes:On living:“I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am.”“I’ve lived out my melancholy youth. I don’t give a fuck any more what’s behind me, or what’s ahead of me. I’m healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day. Today! Le bel aujourd’hui!”“I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer. Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, and plunge it up to the hilt. And if rape were the order of the day then rape I would, and with a vengeance.”“I’m not an American any more, nor a New Yorker, and even less a European, or a Parisian. I haven’t any allegiance, any responsibilities, any hatreds, any worries, any prejudices, any passion. I’m neither for nor against. I’m a neutral.”“Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy. So much crowds into my head when I say this to myself: images, gay ones, terrible ones, maddening ones…”“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 belong to the earth! I say that lying on my pillow and I can feel the horns sprouting from my temples.”“It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance! ‘I love everything that flows,’ said the great blind Milton of our times. … Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. …”On art:“A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. It is right and just, because he must! And anything that falls short of this frightening spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less intoxicated, less contaminating, is not art. The rest is counterfeit. The rest is human. The rest belongs to life and lifelessness.”On sadness:“When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into a deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow; it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.How many thousand times, in walking through the streets at night, have I wondered if the day would ever come again when she would be at my side…”On the difference between Americans and Europeans:“How could I have foreseen, in America, with all those firecrackers they put up your ass to give you pep and courage, that the ideal position for a man of my temperament was to look for orthographic mistakes? Over there you think of nothing but becoming President of the United States some day. Potentially every man is Presidential timber. Here it’s different. Here every man is potentially a zero. If you become something or somebody it is an accident, a miracle. The chances are thousand to one that you will never leave your native village.”On the machine of society, compare it to Kerouac twenty years later:“The same story everywhere. If you want bread you’ve got to get in harness, get in lock step. Over all the earth a gray desert, a carpet of steel and cement. Production! More nuts and bolts, more barbed wire, more dog biscuits, more lawn mowers, more ball bearings, more high explosives, more tanks, more poison gas, more soap, more toothpaste, more newspapers, more education, more churches, more libraries, more museums. Forward!”On religion, describing a church he and his buddies wander into:“A huge, dismal tomb it was with mourners shuffling in and out. A sort of antechamber to the world below. Temperature about 55 or 60 Fahrenheit. No music except this undefinable dirge manufactured in the subcellar – like a million heads of cauliflower wailing in the dark. People in shrouds were chewing away with that hopeless dejected look of beggars who hold out their hands in a trance and mumble an unintelligible appeal. This sort of thing existed I knew, but then one also knows that there are slaughterhouses and morgues and dissecting rooms. One instinctively avoids such places. In the street I had often passed a priest with a little prayer book in his hands laboriously memorizing his lines. Idiot, I would say to myself, and let it go at that.”Lastly this one on sleeping in, which made my smile:“I was always hungry myself, since it was impossible for me to go to breakfast which was handed out at some ungodly hour of the morning, just when the bed was getting toasty.”

Miller has a deep understanding of men and how they interact with each other. Although far from a light read, it is still delightful. It's about letting go and allowing the world to take you where it will. It's very Zen. The ending is lyrical and beautiful without losing its masculinity. This is the closest thing to "guy lit" that I've ever read.

It's clear pretty much from the start that Henry Miller is a contested and contentious character. Always worse than scholarly introductions are those "this book is a big deal!" popular-edition freeform essay introductions, and here we get one from somebody Shapiro that makes Miller a prophet of joy--blurgh, followed up for lagniappe by the foreword by Anaïs Nin, who does her love a solid in her rickety prose by--ricketily--making him sound like one hell of a party (which is better.)Is this a song of joy? Shapiro, writing in the sixties, seems willfully blind a bit in a hippie way—Miller’s joy is barely sublimated rage, as his curses are Biblical—“I will spit upon your corpse.” All that is, is good, and hey shove it up your ass for good measure. I get that. And sure he had plenty of sexy times, but it strikes me that this is less a song of the uncoiling snake or whatever than the reverse—it’s the sex that’s the pretext—for the stories, for having something to talk about, for the up your face to bourgeois Amerika on some level obviously but much more about the homosociality for which the “cunt” is pretext. Moldorf may be word drunk, lost in the w-hole, but Miller himself is word-tipsy and feeling gregarious. Less libidinist than raconteur.He also uses words to subjugate, of course, and I’m not talking about “cunt,” though it is indexical. It’s when he gets all “Stick a lizard up your ass! Shitza blitza!” and frothing at the mouth like something out of The Exorcist that it’s a downer. He’s taking an aggressive pose, and I won’t dwell on the misogyny because, again, the women are by the by and the point is to talk tough and turn hard livin’ heartily embraced into a literary regalia—to peacock. He would have lasted long in the torture chambers if he’d looked good and gotten ladies and had other aspiring poets say things like “Ol’ Hank Miller, hooo boy” within earshot. I wish I’d been younger when I got to this book and it would have hit me all different like in interesting ways, but then I also wish he’d been younger when he wrote it, and it would seem less belligerent in its self-conscious solipsism.But the self is still previous, and the story of the self and the world is still one of survival against the odds, for the transient and for the suburbanest accountant with his RRSP—thus is Rimbaud the flip side of Goethe. And sorry, Henry Miller of “Brooklyn, Paris, and Big Sur,” you will not get away with pretending you’re not another arm of the capitalist millipus, the one whose whoring and anti-Semitism and weird rage about the gays show the most exquisite concern with propriety, the one who launched a thousand gap years. Some parts of this are just so “I am a massive penis other men are faggot jew betas” and he might as well be trolling on the internet and we are supposed to kiss his dick just because he writes with swears.And even when there’s a crash in his careful balance and he ends up stealing the baby’s food or whatever, this should be hangover catharsis, but not so because he’s trading in glamour and the mood of self-aggrandizement has already been set. Shapiro quotes Orwell’s essay on Miller semi-approvingly except that he doesn’t like that Orwell doesn’t like that Miller doesn’t like to talk about “the social,” because it’s all about the centre of the mind, man! Wavy gravy! And I guess I don’t blame Miller for that, but it’s nevertheless true that a little excursion into the third person or so would have done him well.BUT NEVERTHELESS. Miller is very, very, very good for paragraphs at a time. And the level of visious blaggery mellows throughout. And then sometimes he cuts through it completely and produces something sensitive like his vignette of Van Norden and the woman who won’t sleep with him—and then it’s back to autonomy through this needy-ass, diffident, never entirely convincing misanthropy.Tho you know it’s not just Van N., his people are quite good often—the Irish painter and his wife who is more talented who he hates, a whole heartbreaker of an I-remember-this-guy where the only thing that goes wrong is that all the characters regardless of idiom say the word “cunt” in exactly the same way. This is Miller’s way of being undone by cunt, I guess.He is worse on places than people; has something to prove. Blasé on China one minute, exoticizing it the next, in the way of so many people from our big continent who take their one trip to Rome or Hawaii and present it like a sailor’s logbook. His Paris is jolly and reeking and cruel and all that, but it’s limited both by the persona and by the fact that he’s writing what he knows, which is whoring and apes-together male shit leavened with moments of joy … and, let me say, this postlapsarian wist that goes with the Paris trip too, for Proust and Matisse—and of course Miller’s followers had their attenuated experience too, it’s in the nature of this stuff, like vampires weakening by the number of their generations from Cain—but still, Miller came in the thirties and not the twenties and he could have easily been a balding John Glassco and you should thank him for putting his balls into it.Like, that magnificent scene two thirds in with the two women, the one he meets outside the café and the one he goes home with—short, spare, self-loathing without exploiting or apologizing for it. Cunt only used once.And cunt drops precipitously from then on in fact and the last part of this book is so special—a paean, a soulsong. Starting with the bit on Goether and Whitman, through the loving and magnificent description of one particular cunt (his wife’s), and then into a description of Dijon that’s architectural and painterly, laying down roads like bones like rock and splattering them with sickish greys. The book should have started with Goethe, we should have seen a young Hank Miller go over to France to teach English and then go off the rails—instead it’s not till he’s proved whatever it is he had to prove and stopped with the Tourette’s that he can show us what a writer he is.And after we’ve grown eyes all over and fallen to bits in a mystic apotheosis, it’s back to cunt, but this time with a wink and a barrel of previously withheld charm, instead of coming on like a … fuck, dog track crack addict or something. Miller at his best woos with smiles and box wine invincibility. You can see why cunts go for him.

I love Henry Miller's honesty and power over words. This is his first, and I think his best.Bawdy, pornographic, he makes fun of himself and everyone around him. Gorgeous prose.

This is a Rabelaisian novel first and foremost. While rough around the edges, it is full of life. Henry Miller's once-banned memoir-like novel is better than any reality TV show (pardon me, that standard is too low to be meaningful). Using a picaresque style he tells of journeying through and around France while sharing experiences that seem as real as any dream, or nightmare, can be. Combining autobiography and fiction, some chapters follow a narrative of some kind and refer to Miller's actual friends, colleagues, and workplaces; others are written as stream-of-consciousness reflections that are occasionally epiphanic. The novel is written in the first person, as are many of Miller's other novels, and does not have a linear organization, but rather fluctuates frequently between the past and present.Even better for me were the observations of the narrator on life and art, for example: describing an artist he wrote: "An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what an artist needs is loneliness." There are other comments like this -- perhaps somewhat arrogant, but almost always funny, ironic, interesting or some combination of these.Describing his perception of Paris during this time, Miller wrote:"One can live in Paris—I discovered that!—on just grief and anguish. A bitter nourishment—perhaps the best there is for certain people. At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. ... I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love. I understood why it is that here, at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange; it is here that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair. One walks the streets knowing that he is mad, possessed, because it is only too obvious that these cold, indifferent faces are the visages of one's keepers. Here all boundaries fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is. The treadmill stretches away to infinitude, the hatches are closed down tight, logic runs rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing."(pp 180-182)Miller's style makes you think about what is happening and what is being said, whether you like it or not. Often viewing life from the under the under side it is a crazy wonderful book. Not for prudes - if there are any left in the twenty-first century.

A great first novel.In this age of formulaic prose and plots crafted in seminars and workshops, it is a guilty pleasure to find a book written by a man who had precious little instruction and still managed to get something of his raw experience on paper.Do not approach this book looking to find linguistic talent. You will be disappointed. What you will find here is an artist, young and inexperienced, trying desperately to give voice to the thing that burns his eyes from the inside out.Do not approach this book looking for sex. Yes, you will find it. However, I doubt that it will meet your expectations. At one point in his career, Miller tried to write 'proper' pornography. Everything he did was rejected because there was too much thinking and not enough screwing.Miller's style not only uses the first person, but the main character is also named Henry Miller. It's a nice trick, one that was used before, and it puts the reader into a frame of mind that what they are reading may in fact be non-fiction or memoir. It is of course still fiction though. Miller may have screwed a lot, but not that much. He may have been hungry, but he wasn't that hungry.If you are interested in Henry Miller's life, I recommend reading Erica Jong's biography of Miller. It's sad to think that he slipped into demensia in his final years, especially when you discover how alive this man was in his youth. Such vigor!As for Cancer, it was the start of the life journey for an artist. Approach it in this light and you will see why I gave it five stars.

I am happy to be able say I have read this American classic. Did I like it? No. Was I impressed by some of the writing. Yes.

Wow! What a controversial book. I can see why it was banned and why so many opinions are polarized in the ratings. First of all, I have to warn anyone who is thinking about reading this that there is a lot of crude language and blatant description of sex. That didn't bother me. What I did have trouble with was the misogynistic attitude of the main character, who often simply refers to women using the C word and treats them as objects rather than human beings.That said, the author is writing about a misogynistic individual living in Paris during the depression and he does it with rawness and some beautifully written passages. Anyone reading this book needs to bear in mind that our culture is very different now. I think that reading this with a group who has a knowledgeable leader or using a reading guide is your best bet if you really want to get something out of it. There's a lot of meat to this book - if you can get underneath the layer of crudeness. It's a stream of consciousness piece about life and what it truly means to be happy, and the author shows us that it doesn't necessarily involve being wealthy.Who should read this: Fans of authors such as Bukowski and Hemingway.Who should not read this: Anyone who is squeamish or easily offended.

Another book on living in Paris.Miller's life there was rather tough, the most money coming from the wife in US, and that meant lots of trouble for him - definitely not a man of a single woman (he had about 5 wives, numbered 1..5 in his books).The Tropics are probably the best works about the time Miller spent in Paris, very well written, even though using rather obscene language.What I clearly recall:- the way women are ALWAYS objects to be used by Miller (and yes.... he's been using them A LOT!)- the 'collection of failures', the museum Miller built during his entire life, few bookshelves where he gathered small things to remind him of every single failure he's been through (and there were MANY of those!)Very realistic, 100% authentic - hard to tell where's the fiction in Miller's books (all autobiographical). A tough guy. Sometimes difficult to pick the subject of a book between the long list of obsessions described and the colorful language...What impressed me most and got me really curious was his lifetime friendship with Lawrence Durell (who I personally couldn't read), and the intensive correspondence they kept the entire life. It's now all published... and parts of it, some of the letters, are very descriptive and full of details on the books they both wrote. Makes it a lot easier to get what Miller intended to say through his novels.

Miller is my favorite writer of words and this is my favorite book of his although most of them are very similar. Man lives in city, man is deadbeat, man drinks a lot, man borrows money from people, man has sex, man says, "c@nt" a lot. Repeat.

I rarely give up on a book before finishing it, but it got to the point where I was avoiding reading because this book was going nowhere, and had been going nowhere for the last few hundred pages. The writing was great, but I can only take so many pages of tangents and rambling before I lose interest. Perhaps I'll give it another shot in ten years or so.

Miller's language and style are brilliant. I enjoyed his stories about his friends and peers a lot more than the rambling surrealist passages that pop up now and again. His character becomes less and less likable as the book goes on. That said, the point of this book is not for the reader to like the main character. Miller was basically an old school hipster complaining about hipster problems (before it was cool).

Not my cup of tea. Not as offensive and obscene as I'd hoped. Too philosophical.