Book Review: “Tropic of Cancer” by Henry Miller
His anecdotal life
The style of Cancer varies - from simple and straightforward when Miller is telling a story to grand and somewhat boring when he slips into his philosopho-poetic moods (he gets philosophical and expresses his abstractions in almost indecipherable poetic prose).
Those endless boring passages - how I used to hate them! But now I am more open minded and my ideas on what a book can be have expanded. Those long stretches of poetic fancy are like the scenery you see when sitting in a plane or car or ship during your travels. After a while, all scenery looks monotonous, looks the same, and feels meaningless because you are merely seeing it rather than directly experiencing it.
Watching the scenery float or zip past the window, you start fo feel drowsy, you daydream, you get lost in memories. And that is exactly what those long stretches of philosophy and poetry do to me: I feel drowsy, I daydream, I am bitten by the nostalgia bug.
But all in all, those long stretches of boredom make the anecdotes worthwile when Miller resumes the narrative. It's like how sitting in a car for long hours makes your few hours of enjoying a town worthwhile, when you can eat in a restaurant or have a drink or walk around town or visit the markets or make some friends or meet up with a girl you know who lives in that town ...
So at the end of the book you really feel like the book took you somewhere. The place it takes you is Paris in the nineteen thirties. not the glamorous Paris we hear about, but the seedy Paris, the down and out Paris, where the prostitutes and pimps and the starving writers were living.
It's a story told by a man who has stopped striving. Recall what Solomon says about striving: "All is vanity." Since he is no longer striving, he can be happy. He has accepted himself and his lot in life. Since he has accepted, he can celebrate. Hence this book is a song of acceptance and celebration. It's a very unique point of view, and not even Bukowski reached such heights. It is possible to outgrow Bukowski, to know everything he has to say because his prose is really direct, but Henry Miller's books are as deep and vast as the sea and as full of flaura and fauna and all sorts of treasures and trash.
The book does not tell a story. It tells experiences and thoughts. It’s autobiographical, though slanted and twisted by the writer’s imagination. When he gets in his element, Miller can really tell a tale. One of the characters in the book tells him he has an "anecdotal life" and that is a fitting summary of this book and Miller’s entire ouevre. It’s a series of anecdotes, and in between are the fits of rambling poetry.
If you have ever read Dostoyevsky, that's what to expect: human traits at the extremes, so that every person we encounter in the narrative has something of the grotesque about them, even the sane and normal ones.
There are writers who see qrotesques everywhere they look and Miller is one of them. They see deformities, grotesques, absurdities, tragedies, ugliness, sickness, death, and everything extreme in everything they look at, no middle way, always the extremes.
I am not sure I am expressing this observation correctly. Everything has this exaggerated or ridiculous hue. I mean, these writers transform the world into something else - it doesn’t quite feel like the world we live in. It has been twisted by their imagination.
