Friday, 4 September 2015

Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller



What was the incredible pull that France had on American writers in the early 20th century? I’ve watched Midnight in Paris and read Tropic of Cancer and didn’t quite understand it: the first seemed to paint a world so perfect it probably never existed, the latter a world so grim that I wonder why Miller didn’t try to swim his way back to the US.

The prose is obviously innovative for its time, but that doesn’t mean that it’s particularly pleasant to read. At least the sections set in Paris manage to show a glimpse of hope for the author’s life, his future, and possibly the future of mankind. But the pages about his experience as a teacher in Dijon are some of the driest – and possibly rather useless – pages I have read lately.

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