Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller

This book is not a pleasant book, nor is it a beautiful book. Arthur Miller describes, in great detail, the dirty, low, diseased and prostitute-obsessed world of Paris in the 1930s. His thesis is clear: if we are to celebrate and worship life, then we must seek out where life is the fullest, where life thrives in all the various ugly and festering corners. There is a beauty in every facet and variation of life, every form of existence. This book is an attempt to find life and beauty in the very bacteria and mould of those dark Paris apartments, those dingy clubs and late night acts of copulation. Life runs thickly through this novel, impulsively, authentically.

The detail and immense amount of catastrophe inherent in the world turns to a form of static, a hum, a slow drone of tragedy, a dulling to the sensitivity of catastrophe. With that dulling brings a lack of responsibility and culpability by way of a lack of a belief in the existence of a tomorrow. The result is liberation, a powerlessness to act except by impulse and necessity. This novel is a translation of Whitman back into Europe, into a continent dominated by pre-existence and existence. It is the extension of Whitman’s enthusiasm of life extended to the very basest forms of life, to embrace the most impure.

At times it’s crass, banal, racist, sexist, antisemitic; an unfiltered cross-section of 1930s bohemian Paris. Buried deep in the depths of endless episodes of mundanity and depravity are five or six moments of such clarity and lucidity that burn with a hard gemlike flame. When contrasted with the pages and pages of absurd and insane detail these moments are buried deep within the effect produced is of the most profound self-reflection.

Indeed, in one of these moments of self-reflection the book states the very outcome it achieves:

I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul.