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    Tropic of Cancer
    Tropic of Cancer
    Tropic of Cancer
    Audiobook (abridged)2 hours

    Tropic of Cancer

    Written by Henry Miller

    Narrated by Ian McShane

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    TROPIC OF CANCER BY HENRY MILLER. Tropic of Cancer is regarded as a masterpiece with Time magazine rating it as one of the 100 most important novels of the 20th century. It is an unforgettable, confessional, warts and all novel of the author and his friends riotous adventures in Paris during the Depression. It changed censorship laws in the US where it was published decades after it was written and reading it today amplifies the debt that modern writers owe Miller. Ian McShane’s rich and sexy voice provides the layers and depth to a compelling listening experience.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Copyright Group
    Release dateJan 1, 2014
    ISBN9781780002545
    Author

    Henry Miller

    Henry Valentine Miller was born in New York City in 1891 and raised in Brooklyn. He lived in Europe, particularly Paris, Berlin, the south of France, and Greece; in New York; and in Beverly Glen, Big Sur, and Pacific Palisades, California where he died in 1980. He is also the author, among many other works, of Tropic of Capricorn, the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, Plexus, Nexus), and The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.

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    Reviews for Tropic of Cancer

    3.5/5

    1,554 ratings59 reviews

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    • 3/5
      It's just like Midnight in Paris: same setting, but replace Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard with a creepy, balding drunk guy, who stares directly into the camera, creepily telling you all about his sex life, or else just grinding his teeth, for the duration of the movie. (Yes this hypothetical film gets 3 out of 5 stars. I'm as surprised as you are.)I dunno. It's a book about empty rooms. Empty people in empty rooms. For best results read when you're moving into a new apartment. (If you have a mortgage, don't bother. This book hates you and you'll hate it right back.)

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      Verslag van zijn verblijf in Parijs, redelijk zwartgallig, licht-surrealistisch en vooral heel ontdaan. Interessant om zijn beelden van de zelfkant van de grootstad. Heel direct in zijn seksuele beschrijvingen op het obscene af, en daardoor uiteraard 'baanbrekend'. Maar het boeit niet!
    • 1/5
      This book was a pointless, misogynist rambling. A bunch of men in Paris getting the clap and running their mouths until their teeth and hair fall out. I don’t agree with banning books though. This garbage should be available for all who want to read it. Ian McShane’s narration was the bright spot.
    • 2/5
      Pretentious and boring. No plot. Rambling stream of narrative. Relies on shock value for impact, but language that was shocking in the 30's is now common.
    • 1/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Brief spats of intense dialouge. Themes which are cynical, sensual, a humanity devoid of Good Religon. Automated rants striking the implied chords which are otherwise left without adequate resonance. The goal isn't man's search for meaning, it is man's chauvinistic yearning for intensity, the quest to superceed oneself via avenues of bliss, excess, and the natural pain which follows.
    • 4/5
      Henry Miller said of his classic, "This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word." He was correct. Whatever this type between two covers may be, it isn't a book. Miller hurls away every traditional expectation of Western fiction with both hands. Tropic of Cancer has nothing to recommend it but utterly brilliant writing and compelling narration. It is a turgid, nonstop onslaught of sociopathic confessionalism and overwrought surrealism, shot through with unabashed misogyny (women are described at least 2000 times by simply nationality and the C-word), racism, and anti-Semitism. There are sex scenes aplenty, but they are woven in so seamlessly that they don't seem dirty: obscenity would require some sort of setup; some distinction between the naughty and the nice. There is no nice. There is no love--no higher feeling whatsoever, in fact--no plot, and not even the merest suggestion of an original idea. At times, the writing veers off into two or three pages of the hugely ridiculous.

      Miller's narrator, an expatriate writer whose name (make of this what you will) is Henry Miller, races through 1930s Paris a proud and self-confessed inhuman parasite, without the slightest clue that only his good looks, charm, and high I.Q. net him all the food, shelter, and sex he needs for a Walt Whitmanesque existence. Selfishness reigns supreme, and it is assumed that the narrator (who is at least 15 years too old for this kind of behavior) is owed, by divine right, the satisfaction of every desire by a chaotic universe populated by other selfish beings. It is impossible that any of Henry's so-called, interchangeable "friends" could be sicker than he is, and yet they are. Glimmers of black humor boil up out of the cauldron once in a while out of the Parisian gutters, but for the most part, Tropic of Cancer is serious antibusiness.

      The closest thing Miller provides to a heroine is an insane Russian princess, Macha, who manages to be more disgusting, more conniving, and a more outrageous liar than all the men put together, and thereby earn, if not respect, then awe, the right to be called by her first name, and relative longevity (they don't get rid of her for at least two weeks) in the narrative. In the course of his nonjourney through this nonbook, the narrator learns nothing; he knows it all already; he is trying to convince the reader of nothing. Of course, nearly 80 years later we know that Miller's road doesn't lead to freedom but to reality TV, and that casting aside taboos and looking at the sordid underbelly of everything isn't ultimately liberating, but boring.

      Every time I opened the novel, it gave me the sensation of being run over by a crazy bus with really muddy tires, or smacked in the face with a huge wave of lurid hedonism; and then I shook a chapter or three of Tropic of Cancer off like a heebie-jeebie and went about my business, and then (WHY?) picked it up again.

      In a word, weird. Anais Nin thought it was the new King James Bible, but then she was sleeping with the author, and she was Anais Nin. If his mother hadn't beaten him and had given him a little affection, Miller would have been America's greatest writer. Four stars plus and not recommended for anyone, ever.
    • 2/5
      While I am glad that I finally read this classic, it really wasn't my sort of book. Miller seems to be fixated on sex and the decay of death (and by that I mean all the physical grossness of it - all the disgusting details of putrefaction).
    • 4/5
      First, this rating is based on listening to the audiobook, which I don't think was a good idea. There is nothing wrong with Campbell Scott's reading. He's easy to listen to and his French pronunciation sounds fine to a non-speaker like me. However, because this book consists of episodes and not really much plot to speak of, except the continuing experiences of a mostlly down-and-out American in Paris (and briefly LeHavre and Dijon), it's easy to drift away while you're driving down the road listening. I think Miller's prose would work better on the printed page where you have to pay more attention, because by and large it is worth paying attention. You'll have to get over any repulsion about how women are described and treated in the book, of course. It is despicable. And then there is the language, which got the book banned for quite a while. There seems to be more focus on sex acts in the first part of the book but perhaps you just get used to it. In any case, there is nothing erotic here. Depressing sex is just a part of the whole, mosty depressing story. But at times, even listening to the audiobook, there are passages that are seriously well done and that would benefit from a rereading. I'm intrigured to do more reading of Miller--if I ever find the time.
    • 5/5
      Henry Miller is now one of my favorite authors. Not my in my top five, but definitely high up there now. Loved this man's writing style. He can write prose. In the intro of my edition it says he didn't like poetry, but he sure wrote like a beatnik poet. However, this isn't really like poetry, but more the stream of consciousness. Be warned this book has no plot, which is why I really liked it. Noticing I like books with very little plot and either character developments or big long "rambles" from the author.

      Maybe most people know of this book because it's one of the many notorious books band for "obscenity." Yes this has graphic sex scenes, but that kind of the point. Makes you realize that sex is perfectly fine to talk abut in books. We talk about it with our partners, others, and have fantasies. Why not have a book about real life talk about sex? You begin to realize not all, but a lot of writers just don't have the balls anymore to write like they use to write.

      I love the fact this book makes you think about various things too. If you're like me, your mind will wonder and think about other things. That perfectly fine though. I feel like this book wants you to do that, since Henry Miller does the same with his writing. Make me think why exactly Paris is sometime portrayed as this romantic get away. Yes this boo is erotica, but sure made Pris look like a slum...like other stuff I read.

      Another thing I like about this book was the history. Very much like how I read Lady Chatterley's Lover. These writers were writing at a time period when sex was a hush-hush topic. In fact it still is today sadly. However, these writers had the balls to say they had a voice that need to be heard. I wish more writers did stuff like this. But not like 50 Shades, but stuff with more of a meaning then a fan-fiction attempt.

      Ending the note that yes I'm reading a lot of books about sex lately and yes they are changing my attitude. They are making me be more honest of a person, more open about my sexual preferences, and making me realize books need to go back to having a point rather then money makers. Not saying everyone should read this book, but it is a book that (if you don't mind the topic) is worth a read.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      I came to Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer many decades after its 1934 release in France, and its subsequent banning in this country. After its ground-breaking obscenity trial, it was finally published here in 1961. So, add sixty years, and you get to when I finally got around to reading it. My late wife, Vicky, loved his writing. Now, because I have waited so long to read it, I will never be able to talk to her about why she liked him so much. He who hesitates is truly lost in this case. If I had to guess why she found the book so interesting, it wasn’t because of the vocabulary of cunt, pussy, twat, prick, and others—though Vicky liked the sometimes shocking and unusual—my guess is that she liked the freeform style, the very loosely-told story of people doing whatever they wanted to do, as well as the candid descriptions of sex. Another part of the book that had to attract her was the attitude of people thinking the hell with people’s opinions and society’s norms. This rebellion had everything to do with Miller’s life in Paris, as much of the book is a reporting on and a reflection of that time in his life. When I drop back and look at the book from my viewpoint as a well-read old duffer in 2021, it doesn’t seem as rebellious and shocking, as I’ve seen and read that kind of a story so many times already. It’s harder to experience a groundbreaking piece of art as still fresh after it’s been repeated and played off of so many times. This reminds me of a time that Vicky and I watched Citizen Kane all the way through for the first time, and when the credits played at the end, we looked at each other and said, “So?” All the shots and effects that were truly groundbreaking when the film was released in 1941, we’d both seen countless times in countless movies. Later, someone was talking about what all the “first time ever” shots were in that film, and you had to be impressed, but perception is sometimes all about perspective.Yet, it was interesting finding the life of Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer. “What need I for money? I am a writing machine.” Reflecting on his life and art. “It is not difficult to be alone if you are poor and a failure. An artist is always alone—if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.”There was a hard side that kept coming out in the novel. “The world is a cancer eating itself.” “People are like lice—they get under your skin and bury themselves there.” He also wrote about the whores that were answering a constant need for the book’s characters. “Who wants a delicate whore?” The following section probably caught the attention of the censors. “She used candles, Roman candles, and door knobs. Not a prick in the land big enough for her … not one. Men went inside her and curled up. She wanted extension pricks, self-exploding rockets, hot boiling oil made of wax and creosote. She would cut off your prick and keep it inside her forever, if you gave her permission. One cunt out of a million.”I am left respecting Tropic for how Miller broke new ground, but I wasn’t sold on it as a book. Cunt, pussy, and prick got old and I was left with how people were being treated. Hard drinking, carousing, and whoring are exciting at first, yet tiring after a while, and poor as a spectator sport. The style was interesting in how it was so vague and loose, but whores, bedbugs, and always searching for sex and a bed for the night, wasn’t a story for my head at this time. But I will leave you with this fine line and summary of the book’s lifestyle. “All I ask of life, is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt.”
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      What a fantastic book! It's sad, comic, coarse, subtle, and brilliant, written in blood; and the language is vibrant, hyperbolic and colourful! Looking forward to reading his other books.
      "Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of 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."
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      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.
    • 1/5
      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.
    • 1/5
      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.
    • 1/5
      Complete Shite. End of!!
    • 5/5
      Miller blew my mind when I was in college. I wonder what I would think now.
    • 4/5
      Henry Miller said of his classic, "This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word." He was correct. Whatever this type between two covers may be, it isn't a book. Miller hurls away every traditional expectation of Western fiction with both hands. Tropic of Cancer has nothing to recommend it but utterly brilliant writing and compelling narration. It is a turgid, nonstop onslaught of sociopathic confessionalism and overwrought surrealism, shot through with unabashed misogyny (women are described at least 2000 times by simply nationality and the C-word), racism, and anti-Semitism. There are sex scenes aplenty, but they are woven in so seamlessly that they don't seem dirty: obscenity would require some sort of setup; some distinction between the naughty and the nice. There is no nice. There is no love--no higher feeling whatsoever, in fact--no plot, and not even the merest suggestion of an original idea. At times, the writing veers off into two or three pages of the hugely ridiculous.

      Miller's narrator, an expatriate writer whose name (make of this what you will) is Henry Miller, races through 1930s Paris a proud and self-confessed inhuman parasite, without the slightest clue that only his good looks, charm, and high I.Q. net him all the food, shelter, and sex he needs for a Walt Whitmanesque existence. Selfishness reigns supreme, and it is assumed that the narrator (who is at least 15 years too old for this kind of behavior) is owed, by divine right, the satisfaction of every desire by a chaotic universe populated by other selfish beings. It is impossible that any of Henry's so-called, interchangeable "friends" could be sicker than he is, and yet they are. Glimmers of black humor boil up out of the cauldron once in a while out of the Parisian gutters, but for the most part, Tropic of Cancer is serious antibusiness.

      The closest thing Miller provides to a heroine is an insane Russian princess, Macha, who manages to be more disgusting, more conniving, and a more outrageous liar than all the men put together, and thereby earn, if not respect, then awe, the right to be called by her first name, and relative longevity (they don't get rid of her for at least two weeks) in the narrative. In the course of his nonjourney through this nonbook, the narrator learns nothing; he knows it all already; he is trying to convince the reader of nothing. Of course, nearly 80 years later we know that Miller's road doesn't lead to freedom but to reality TV, and that casting aside taboos and looking at the sordid underbelly of everything isn't ultimately liberating, but boring.

      Every time I opened the novel, it gave me the sensation of being run over by a crazy bus with really muddy tires, or smacked in the face with a huge wave of lurid hedonism; and then I shook a chapter or three of Tropic of Cancer off like a heebie-jeebie and went about my business, and then (WHY?) picked it up again.

      In a word, weird. Anais Nin thought it was the new King James Bible, but then she was sleeping with the author, and she was Anais Nin. If his mother hadn't beaten him and had given him a little affection, Miller would have been America's greatest writer. Four stars plus and not recommended for anyone, ever.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      I've got to admit that I like this a lot better than I did when I first read it over 20 years ago, but I'm still no fan of the no-plot novel. Very similar to the feeling I got from Kerouac's On the Road in that these people are so self-absorbed. In the long run, who can really give a crap about them? But I do have a better appreciation for Miller's use of language.
    • 4/5
      Extraordinarily interesting in places, it is extremely patchy with a sentence, or even several paragraphs, of excellent writing followed by pages of wasted paper and ink. The verbosity is maddening. Miller needed a good editor.

      His moment of existential satori, which is described at page 97 et seq., in this edition, is followed by an intellectual leap of faith that is not rational; I think Miller would argue the absence of rational thinking on this issue was his point.

      My other criticism would be that Miller tries to paint himself as a down-and-outer when he was a spoiled American, slumming in Paris with the Pound, Woolf and Hemingway crowd, who occasionally didn't get his American Express payment on time and had to borrow from American friends. He was never truly on the bum. In no way did he ever approach real destitution like Hamsun, Fante, Celine or Bukowski experienced. That difference in experience is significant and substantial because it makes him a poverty dilettante for whom being poor is an interesting experience that he can claim to embrace with joy and celebration. He did not experience the horror of contemplating death by starvation. It's easy to see why a later generation of upper middle class youth, who temporarily rejected their parent's wealth, identified with him.

      A worthy read because of its reputation but not nearly as good as he frequently credited because his experience is less than genuine and the writing is so verbose.
    • 3/5
      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).
    • 2/5
      One of those bizarre cases of a book with brilliant style and language that for whatever reason never grabs me. It's slow and meandering, which I generally do not mind, but I've tried to read this a few times and haven't gotten more than 60 pages. I mean, I love Hunger and Ask the Dust, and those don't have any more direction than this, but Miller seemed all to pleased with his philosophical musings to actually write a good book.

      It's unfortunate for me, anyway, because the 60 pages I read contained hundreds of amazing lines or quips, but they never seemed to gel into a compelling whole.
    • 3/5
      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.

    • 3/5
      Not my cup of tea. Not as offensive and obscene as I'd hoped. Too philosophical.
    • 1/5
      I'm holding off on putting a rating up here - for the sake of my BookClub, since we're not discussing this book for another few weeks. That said, I'm going to put the review up at Raging Biblioholism under some serious spoiler hiding stuff... and I'll star this thing soon as we've all read it.