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A review by blueyorkie
Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
3.0
In Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller appears in a hallucinated monologue of a type on the fringes, of an outsider, a magnificent loser, rebellious, flayed alive, of a saturnal personality (O Verlaine!).
Miller retraces the life of his Brooklyn neighborhood as he first knew it as a child: his memories of his grandfather's little tailor shop and the smells of the businesses in his community - the Mephistopheles infection of tanner's skin with the irresistible scent of fresh bread and confectionery pastries. He thus becomes the saddened and revolted witness of the metamorphosis of this once so-familiar setting. Miller reveals himself, on the other hand, as a womanizer, sometimes violent with women, always broke but just as lavish, regularly "tapper" (one would say a scratcher nowadays ...), calculating and, above all, odiously cynical (or fiercely honest it depends ...). But he knows how to be tender, with a sad tenderness reminiscent of the forever bygone days of mischievous, naive, and generous youth. Or when it paints a portrait of his father, jovial and bon vivant, of a healthy anticlericalism. Who, diminished and weakened by illness, seized with remorse of conscience, becomes a late devotee, "elder of his congregation," To finally be extinguished in the emptiness left by the departure of his beloved pastor. The author also recounts his beginnings in a writer's career, the enthusiastic discovery of the Dada movement and surrealism from which he was, spiritually, apart across the Atlantic while ignoring. It seems, its existence. He professes his great admiration for Dostoyevsky and Elie Faure (author of monumental art history) and recounts Bergson's revelation by reading Creative Evolution.
We have spoken of the writer as lively-skinned, and this opus reflects this temperament. Miller belches in well-timed prose all his hatred (his wounded love? His modesty?), All his rage, his anger, destroyed the American dream. He pushes his diatribe against human stupidity, the ugliness of an absurd and frenzied American society, taken by an itch of movement so as not to have to think, cannibal, plagued by violence. His prose is a ferment of madness, an apology for dreams in reaction against a civilization unsurprisingly omnipresent with a harmful obsession for perfection.
It is impossible to ignore the main inconvenience of this work.
Sometimes, the text gets bogged down in delusions of surrealist descriptions, rantings (one of his favorite words), meaningless, and confusing; it becomes boring, almost illegible, and defies the limits of patience and goodwill. Several times, the book nearly fell out of my hands. And then, fiercely for the feminist cause, go your way or suffer the ulcer that will appear when reading the detailed and complacent accounts of the multiple exploits and sexual performances of a sacred hot rabbit.
Miller retraces the life of his Brooklyn neighborhood as he first knew it as a child: his memories of his grandfather's little tailor shop and the smells of the businesses in his community - the Mephistopheles infection of tanner's skin with the irresistible scent of fresh bread and confectionery pastries. He thus becomes the saddened and revolted witness of the metamorphosis of this once so-familiar setting. Miller reveals himself, on the other hand, as a womanizer, sometimes violent with women, always broke but just as lavish, regularly "tapper" (one would say a scratcher nowadays ...), calculating and, above all, odiously cynical (or fiercely honest it depends ...). But he knows how to be tender, with a sad tenderness reminiscent of the forever bygone days of mischievous, naive, and generous youth. Or when it paints a portrait of his father, jovial and bon vivant, of a healthy anticlericalism. Who, diminished and weakened by illness, seized with remorse of conscience, becomes a late devotee, "elder of his congregation," To finally be extinguished in the emptiness left by the departure of his beloved pastor. The author also recounts his beginnings in a writer's career, the enthusiastic discovery of the Dada movement and surrealism from which he was, spiritually, apart across the Atlantic while ignoring. It seems, its existence. He professes his great admiration for Dostoyevsky and Elie Faure (author of monumental art history) and recounts Bergson's revelation by reading Creative Evolution.
We have spoken of the writer as lively-skinned, and this opus reflects this temperament. Miller belches in well-timed prose all his hatred (his wounded love? His modesty?), All his rage, his anger, destroyed the American dream. He pushes his diatribe against human stupidity, the ugliness of an absurd and frenzied American society, taken by an itch of movement so as not to have to think, cannibal, plagued by violence. His prose is a ferment of madness, an apology for dreams in reaction against a civilization unsurprisingly omnipresent with a harmful obsession for perfection.
It is impossible to ignore the main inconvenience of this work.
Sometimes, the text gets bogged down in delusions of surrealist descriptions, rantings (one of his favorite words), meaningless, and confusing; it becomes boring, almost illegible, and defies the limits of patience and goodwill. Several times, the book nearly fell out of my hands. And then, fiercely for the feminist cause, go your way or suffer the ulcer that will appear when reading the detailed and complacent accounts of the multiple exploits and sexual performances of a sacred hot rabbit.