Tropic of Capricorn (Penguin Modern Classics)

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I read the first few chapters...it was boring....then I skipped chapters hoping he would get more interesting..he didn't....kept going...it was still boring...towards the end...he is pathetically sentimental, self-indulgent and boring...

La oportunidad más maravillosa que ofrece la vida es la de ser humano. Abarca todo el universo. Incluye el conocimiento de la muerte, del que ni siquiera Dios goza (p.226). Anyway, it was one of the happy moments of 2014: recognizing that Henry Miller is an intelligent, sensitive human-being and that I want to read more from him. All throughout this book I was thinking about one thing: when was Cancer and when was Capricorn written. The first one was published in 1934, and the second in 1938. Four years made this huge progression – Miller really evolved as a writer, he became more concentrated and maybe a bit humbler. He is still unconventional, but although he's a mad man (I even felt sorry for him, which I think he would hate the most), I've found so much mellowness, wisdom and truth in his words that I found myself having goose skin. He still has neurotic shifts and he writes about so many people, but in the beginning he described as a hypothesis, what would happen if he wrote thousands of stories. Would they collapse, would they kill each other, would a reader die suffocating in overwhelming – ness? The peculiar narrative perspective of Tropic of Capricorn, in which essayistic and free-form ruminations bleed into ostensible autobiography, complicates Miller’s endeavor. He is relating not just what has happened to him, but what he thinks of humanity. Narrative melds with philosophy. The subjective nature of the enterprise is underlined in one of Miller’s opening paragraphs:Simon Reeve's travelogues are generally fascinating viewing - Tropic of Capricorn is the only one with an accompanying book, and also happens to be one I've not watched. The book stands up well against the TV shows and it's easy at times to read the text in Reeve's voice. Henry Miller (ed. Antony Fine), Henry Miller: Stories, Essays, Travel Sketches, New York: MJF Books, 1992, p. 5. Henry just grinned as our friend's hat passed around, and even people that had known him less than an hour tossed in a bit of green. It wasn't until we were leaving, weaving our own snake trail out the door, that my friend discovered that along with the money, Henry had also absconded with his hat.

There was so many beautiful sentences in this book and brilliant thoughts and ways of living your life. It was very introspective for me. I am normally a fast reader but this book took me 3 weeks or something and it was only because it was so dense and profound for most of the time. loved it! really really loved it. I suppose I should preface this review with a warning. This is an explicit book. This book has full of sex. And this book has no plot. I realize quietly what a terribly civilized person I am-the need I have for people, conversation, books, theatre, music, cafes, drinks, and so forth. It's terrible to be civilized, because when you come to the end of the world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness. To be civilized is to have complicated needs, And a man, when he is full blown, shouldn't need a thing."

The guy who turned me down was a little runt who ran the switchboard. He seemed to take me for a college student, though it was clear enough from my application that I had long left school. I had even honored myself on the application with a Ph.D. degree from Columbia University. Apparently that passed unnoticed, or else was suspiciously regarded by this runt who had turned me down. I was furious, the more so because for once in my life I was in earnest. Not only that, but I had swallowed my pride, which in certain peculiar ways is rather large. My wife of course gave me the usual leer and sneer. I had done it as a gesture, she said. I went to bed thinking about it, still smarting, getting angrier and angrier as the night wore on. The fact that I had a wife and child to support didn’t bother me so much; people didn’t offer you jobs because you had a family to support, that much I understood only too well. No, what rankled was that they had rejected me, Henry V. Miller, a competent, superior individual who had asked for the lowest job in the world. That burned me up. I couldn’t get over it. In the morning I was up bright and early, shaved, put on my best clothes and hotfooted it to the subway. I went immediately to the main offices of the telegraph company . . . up to the twenty-fifth floor or wherever it was that the president and the vice-presidents had their cubicles. I asked to see the president. Of course the president was either out of town or too busy to see me, but wouldn’t I care to see the vice-president, or his secretary rather. I saw the vice-president’s secretary, an intelligent, considerate sort of chap, and I gave him an earful. I did it adroitly, without too much heat, but letting him understand all the while that I wasn’t to be put out of the way so easily. The thing of it is Henry couldn't be Henry except for the existence of people like myself who are always willing to buy him a drink and marvel at his stories. He is living off the efforts of "civilized" men and women. He doesn't have to own anything, because someone will always give him what he needs. Céline ha pubblicato Viaggio al Termine della Notte e poi una specie di prequel, che sarebbe Morte a Credito; Miller ha pubblicato Tropico del Cancro e poi una specie di prequel, che sarebbe Tropico del Capricorno; ma Tropico del Capricorno è diversissimo da Morte a Credito

Thanks for your insights Mister Miller! It doesn't feel so bad anymore to think of yourself as kind of alienated and for wanting more out of life and for not fitting into boxes.He had neither pride, nor vanity, nor envy. About the big issues he was clear, but confronted by the petty details of life he was bewildered." What is a fanatic? One who believes passionately and acts desperately upon what he believes. I was always believing in something and so getting into trouble. The more my hands were slapped the more firmly I believed. I believed- and the rest of the world did not! If it were only a question of enduring punishment one could go on believing till the end; but the way of the world is more insidious than that. Instead of being punished you are undermined, hollowed out, the ground taken from under your feet. It isn't even treachery, what I have in mind. Treachery is understandable and combatable. No, it is something worse, something less than treachery. It's a negativism that causes you to overreach yourself. you are perpetually spending your energy in the act of balancing yourself. You are seized with a sort of spiritual vertigo, you totter on the brink, your hair stands on end, you can't believe that beneath your feet lies an immeasurable abyss. It comes about through excess of enthusiasm, through a passionate desire to embrace people, to show them your love. The more you reach out toward the world the more the world retreats. Nobody wants real love, real hatred. Nobody wants you to put your hand in his sacred entrails- that's only for the priest in the hour of sacrifice. While you live, while the blood's still warm, you are to pretend that there is no such thing as blood and no such thing as a skeleton beneath the covering of flesh. "Keep off the grass!" That's the motto by which people live.” This time, I read Tropic of Capricorn, ten years after reading the first book. And once again, I was amazed. This went on from about the middle of the war until . . . well, until one day I was trapped. Finally the day came when I did desperately want a job. I needed it. Not having another minute to lose, I decided that I would take the last job on earth, that of messenger boy. I walked into the employment bureau of the telegraph company–the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of North America–toward the close of the day, prepared to go through with it. I had just come from the public library and I had under my arm some fat books on economics and metaphysics. To my great amazement I was refused the job. The only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past' George Orwell