Tropic of Capricorn (Penguin Modern Classics)

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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."

During a three-week vacation from Western Union in 1922, Miller wrote his first novel, Clipped Wings, a study of 12 Western Union messengers. It has never been published; only fragments remain, although parts of it were recycled in later works, including in the brief portraits of Western Union messengers in Tropic of Capricorn. [1] [2] Yazarın "Yengeç Dönencesi"ni okuduğum yakın zamanda, Henry Miller'ı keşfetmemin ne kadar geç kaldığını anladığımda büyük bir panik hali yaşamış ve en kısa zamanda "Oğlak Dönencesi"ni okuma kararı almıştım. Ancak "Yengeç Dönencesi"nde ki oburluğum burada kendini gösteremedi. Kitap yordu beni bir noktada. O yüzden yarısında ara vermek ve araya birçok kitap sokmak durumunda kaldım. Bu, aslında Miller'in değil, benim densizliğim. Zira Miller tempolu bir hayat içerisinde, dikkatinizi vermeniz gereken onca başka şey varken okunacak eserler yazmıyor. Haliyle ben zamanı yanlış seçmiştim. 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: Henry Miller olay odaklı ve kronolojik bir anlatım benimsemediğinden okuması hayli zor ve meşakkatli oluyor. Okuyucusunu belirleyen bir yazar Miller. Proustvari bir edebiyattan da bahsetmiyorum. Çok daha başına buyruk, savruk, kavramsal bir dili var Miller'in. Altını çizebileceğiniz çok fazla pasajla karşılaşıyorsunuz. Düşüncesini anlatma şekli çok özel ve özgün. Okurken farkına varıyorsunuz, diyorsunuz ki 'bu adam boşuna çağın en önemli yazarlarından biri olmamış'. 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.Mary V. Dearborn, The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991, pp. 70-71. I was always believing in something and so getting into trouble. The more my hands were slapped the more firmly I believed. / 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 towards 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 things as a skeleton beneath the covering of flesh. Keep off the grass! That's the motto by which people live.

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 The most fascinating section is on Paraguay. From the Paraguayan War in the 1860s which saw up to 90% of the adult male population killed, to a brutal dictatorship from 1954 to 1989 (Reeve meets a doctor who was tortured during the regime, electrocuted underwater which caused him to lose control of his bodily functions and was kept underwater to swallow some of it; he later had to perform an autopsy on his own son to prove torture as a cause of death so he could take a legal case in the US), to the indigenous people hunted for sport into the 90s, to an evaluation of the environmental damage biofuels and soy are causing (the doctor who autopsied his son says soy is as much a problem for Paraguay as the dictator was), it's a remarkable insight into a surprisingly little-known country. Tropic of Capricorn, a semi-autobiographical prequel to Tropic of Cancer (set in 1930s Paris), though published a few years after, is set mostly in Manhattan of the 1920s. It's not chronological; rather, it skips around to revisit Miller's hetero-development and sexual high jinks in the Big Apple, including his sexual relationship with his 30-year-old piano teacher when he was 15, and a blunt description of nearly every other first encounter with a very diverse legion of women.

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The conference lasted several hours. Before it was terminated Mr. Clancy took me aside and informed me that he was going to make me the boss of the works. Before putting me into office, however, he was going to ask me as a special favor, and also as a sort of apprenticeship which would stand me in good stead, to work as a special messenger. I would receive the salary of employment manager, but it would be paid me out of a separate account. In short I was to float from office to office and observe the way affairs were conducted by all and sundry. I was to make a little report from time to time as to how things were going. And once in a while, so he suggested, I was to visit him at his home on the q.t. and have a little chat about the conditions in the hundred and one branches of the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company in New York City. In other words I was to be a spy for a few months and after that I was to have the run of the joint. Maybe they’d make me a general manager too one day, or a vice-president. It was a tempting offer, even if it was wrapped up in a lot of horseshit. I said Yes. Perhaps it was Hymie, “the dirty little kike,” who was responsible for the high percentage of Jews on the messenger force. Perhaps Hymie was really the one who was doing the hiring at the employment office–at Sunset Place, they called it. It was an excellent opportunity, I gathered, for Mr. Clancy, the general manager, to take down a certain Mr. Burns who, he informed me, had been the employment manager for some thirty years now and who was evidently getting lazy on the job.