Henry Miller (ed. Antony Fine), Henry Miller: Stories, Essays, Travel Sketches, New York: MJF Books, 1992, p. 5. 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. Miller retraces the life of his Brooklyn neighborhood as he first knew it as a child: his memories of his grandfather's little tailor shop and the smells of the businesses in his community - the Mephistopheles infection of tanner's skin with the irresistible scent of fresh bread and confectionery pastries. He thus becomes the saddened and revolted witness of the metamorphosis of this once so-familiar setting. Miller reveals himself, on the other hand, as a womanizer, sometimes violent with women, always broke but just as lavish, regularly "tapper" (one would say a scratcher nowadays ...), calculating and, above all, odiously cynical (or fiercely honest it depends ...). But he knows how to be tender, with a sad tenderness reminiscent of the forever bygone days of mischievous, naive, and generous youth. Or when it paints a portrait of his father, jovial and bon vivant, of a healthy anticlericalism. Who, diminished and weakened by illness, seized with remorse of conscience, becomes a late devotee, "elder of his congregation," To finally be extinguished in the emptiness left by the departure of his beloved pastor. The author also recounts his beginnings in a writer's career, the enthusiastic discovery of the Dada movement and surrealism from which he was, spiritually, apart across the Atlantic while ignoring. It seems, its existence. He professes his great admiration for Dostoyevsky and Elie Faure (author of monumental art history) and recounts Bergson's revelation by reading Creative Evolution. The premise of the book is Simon Reeve travelling along the Tropic of Capricorn - the imaginary line of latitude running around the globe, (ie south of, and parallel to the equator) at the point where the sun can still be judged to pass directly overhead. As Reeve says in his introduction "It is getting harder to find such a unique journey. Mr Palin has bagged many of the best, and I will not be the first to travel around Capricorn."

Oh henry...a freaking socialist croissant commie cliche? zzzz...at least you were not a puritan protestant prude...I suppose we should we grateful for that...but lets call a spade a spade....he giggolo-ed himself....so his socialism came into good use!

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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. The second is exposing the causes of impacts of global warming - reduced rainfall, deforestation and other environmental issues such as mining, the removal of non-renewable resources, soy production. Of course these things also effect the indigenous population. A cult modern classic, Tropic of Capricorn is as daring, frank and influential as Henry Miller first novel, Tropic of Cancer -- new to Penguin Modern Classics with a cover by Tracey Emin 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. It was all chaos from the beginning, as I have said. But sometimes I got so close to the center, to the very heart of the confusion, that it’s a wonder things didn’t explode around me.

Frank N. Magill, editor, "Tropic of Capricorn," Masterpieces of American Literature, New York: Salem Press, 1993, pp. 567-69. 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. The novel covers Miller's growing inability and outright refusal to accommodate what he sees as America's hostile environment. It is autobiographical but not chronological, jumping between Miller's adolescent adventures in Brooklyn in the 1900s, recollections of his first love Una Gifford, a love affair with his nearly 30-year-old piano teacher when he was 15, his unhappy marriage to his first wife Beatrice, his years working at Western Union (called The Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company in the book) in Manhattan in the 1920s, and his fateful meeting with his second wife June (known in the book as Mara), whom he credits with changing his life and making him into a writer. Miller’s father falls mortally ill as a result of swearing off alcohol and stopping drinking too abruptly. He makes a miraculous recovery, however, when he makes the acquaintance of a Congregationalist minister. He reads the Bible and attends all the minister’s services. He then learns that the minister is leaving town to go to a more advantageous position elsewhere. He tries to persuade the minister to stay, but he fails; this leaves him bitterly disillusioned. He never laughs again, and he takes to sleeping and snoring his life away. Instigated by the image of Hymie’s wife’s diseased ovaries, Miller goes to a figurative place called The Land of F——k.

In Tropico del Capricorno ci sono anche citazioni ed omaggi indiretti: Miller è un'omicida come Hemingway, ma più incosciente, perché bambino e puro

Miller describes his friendship with Roy Hamilton, whom he sees as a kind of mystic and prophet. Hamilton is in search of his biological father, who is either Mr. Hamilton or Miller’s friend MacGregor. Miller views this quest as futile; he views Hamilton as an emancipated man seeking to establish a biological link for which he has no need. When Hamilton leaves, having renounced both paternal candidates, the MacGregor family is distraught. Miller, in contrast, feels no need of Hamilton’s presence after his departure, since Hamilton gave himself completely when he was present. Miller comments that this was his first clean, whole experience of friendship, and his last. This time, I read Tropic of Capricorn, ten years after reading the first book. And once again, I was amazed. La pasión de Miller por el sexo es importante, porque aunque la novela no gire en torno al sexo, tiene gran relevancia en su vida y en las reflexiones que hace sobre la misma. Yo lo llamaría como una especie de sexo-místico, porque hay cierta espiritualidad en lo que quiere vivir Miller y en lo que es su filosofía de vida: decir sí a todo, porque es la única forma de poder vivir honradamente como hombre y ser humano. Darlo todo a la humanidad, entregarse desbocadamente.Quando la gente parla di Henry Miller, parla solo ed esclusivamente di Tropico del Cancro: è come se lui non avesse scritto altro Tropic of Capricorn opens with a passage of philosophical musings, in which Henry Miller compares himself to the people around him and contemplates the futility of life. Everyone around him seems to be a failure; those who aren’t technically failures strike him as all the more ridiculous. In other words, Miller immediately posits a clear disconnect from societal norms of “success” and “progress.” The work ethic holds no appeal for him, nor does the ideal of ambition and upward mobility: “there was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do.” 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." He is married and has a child, but this doesn’t stop him from having an affair with a coworker named Valeska. Asked to look after the Millers’ child while the wife undergoes an abortion, Valeska and Henry make love surrounded by the dominos they had been using to entertain the kid just an hour before. Miller spends many of his nights carousing with his sex-hungry friend MacGregor. He also has befriended a seventeen year-old kid from Harlem named Curley who has no ethics and will steal from anybody, and who occasionally supplies Miller with spare change. Mr. Clancy, the manager, tells Miller he wants to make him “the boss of the works.” Before that can happen, he asks Miller to serve an apprenticeship as a special messenger, paid the salary of employment manager, with the duty of spying on the various branches of the company and reporting on the conditions to his superiors. In a few months, he has a post at the employment office, replacing the former employment manager, Mr. Burns, and is “hiring and firing like a demon” without batting an eye. He describes the company as a farce, a waste of humans and work. The ousted Mr. Burns dies “of a broken heart,” and Miller dives into his work – physically, that is, not emotionally. Men come and go in a rush, dozens hired in one day, fired the next, “holes” plugged on an hourly basis. Miller finds himself responsible for hundreds of men and their livelihoods, reviewing their applications, judging them suitable or unsuitable, luring them in and ushering them out the door in a single swoop. “I never saw such an aggregation of misery in my life,” Miller writes.