There are certain books in everyone's life that it puzzles them that they had not already read it. For my entire adult life, I've explored the catalog of Grove Press, have been inspired by novels that tear away convention, and devoured books that examine the taboo thoughts that we all conceal in our minds. Yet somehow, I'd never read one of the pillars of all three of those criteria....I have now.
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
(Grove Press, originally published 1934)
There are few works of art that one could call revolutionary. This is one of those. Part autobiographical, part philosophical diatribe, part fiction, and pure brutal honesty, this novel was considered dangerous when it was published in Paris and was banned in the U.S. for nearly 30 years.
Deemed pornographic, its publication was forbidden in the land of the free. But this is far from pornographic and the real reason was probably due to the way it rips open the idea of America to examine it from the inside out. It is a response to Whitman, a precursor to Ginsburg's "America", a raw description of what it means to be American, what the ideal of freedom means to one man living in Paris between the wars and exploring the underground world of ideas and art that were born from conflict and destruction.
But it's also about the soul, the darkness that festers there and the beauty that can be illuminated even in that darkness. This novel is the the birth of Post-Modernism, the birth of the Beats, the birth of the French new novel. It is a big bang in the world of literature that spawned ideas and creativity that would dominate the literary world for more than half a century.
In short...it is a masterpiece.
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