I know I'm not original by commenting on this, but why is this book so shit? It was already annoying enough that the intro and preface to the book were two grandiloquent (yes, I just learned that word) douches, but after getting through the first chapter it felt like watching an edgy porno just for the sake of it. I jumped to a future chapter just to see if maybe there would be something else, but it was just the author writing "cunt, cunt, cunt" over again. It's like reading a fourteen-year-old's diary. Am I missing something? Like is this even ironic, or is it just a dated publicity stunt for the sake of testing the limits of media censorship? Or is there anything of value to take from this besides edginess to piss off politicians?
>>25640030>I jumped to a future chapterabsolutely deplorable behavior
sounds like you're a lost cause.
>>25640030just stop you will never get him it's not for you
>>25640030Rosy Crucifixion is significantly better
>>25640030Miller's work relied mainly on shock value. Today's readers are basically unshockable. There's no reason to read him anymore.Anais wrote better smut anyway.
>>25640249
>>25640030>but it was just the author writing "cunt, cunt, cunt" over again.I didn't know Henry Miller was an Australian author?
>>25640030I have that same copy with a TITTY on the cover. Yeah parts (a lot) read like some edgy rantings but I enjoyed it. Him whining about the deplorable conditions at the school was funny.
>>25640274Imagine getting this triggered over a has-been smut purveyor.
I find Miller mostly a slog who has a few good sentences buried among endless poorly written paragrahs. I sat through Cancer and was largely disapointed but enjoyed the more earthy moments, like whn he robbed the prostitute he met, or spoke about his artist friend whose armpits he shaved to get rid of lice. All the surreal descriptions got incredibly boring. In Capricorn he has a really good analysis of the American economy as a kind of metaphycial mechnical nucleus of sorts, and it was quite compelling, but I couldn't even get further than a third into the novel because it was such a slog. I would be interested in reading Miller if he was able to reel himself in. What's strange is I remember seeing an interview with him and Anis Nin and Nin speaks how she basically edited out most of the writing in Cancer for being pointless; if that's the case then I could only imagine Miller simply had no restraint as an artist and just wrote down every banal thought that occured to him in the attempts to convince the world he was a radical intellectual. But as other anons have pointed out, you probably just had to be there at the time. I imagine there was a bit more edge to reading Miller when your brain wasn't fried with hardcore pornagraphy and the books had to be passed around through underground circles because it they were largely banned in a lot of countries. Circumstances like that simply don't exist anymore.
>>25640030Not going to be mean about grandiloquent. I liked this book!IMO much of the prose can be thought of as producing a feeling, sensation, vibe. The way the book opens (we in the villa borghese and all of us are dead) tells you right away that some of the language is non-literal. But throughout the book, these kind of verbal brushstrokes are placed next to actual stories that did happen to him and are frankly pretty fucking hilarious. So you get a curious blend of almost WBE-style travel essays with his unstable stream of consciousness mumbling about modernity and love and life. A mix which can be jarring but also hilarious. I laughed out loud for about five minutes when, after a long, deeply Freudian rant about the horrors of mortality and creatureliness as exemplified by staring into a woman’s vagina, miller starts the next chapter with “it was near-dawn when Fillmore and I brought home two negresses from the telephone company.” It’s a very modern, controversial, defiant, life-affirming book. Miller’s familiarity with Nietzsche clear in this regard, and was to me as a Neetsh fan. Lucid observation of modernity plus joie vivre is a fun combination, although maybe you’d rather read people like Pessoa and Cioran who whine about it and don’t crush pussy like Chadry Miller I suppose it’s common practice here to tell you you got filtered, but I don’t really mean that as a pejorative: it probably just wasn’t the right book for the place and time you’re in.
>>25640030You should read Zootopia fanfiction instead it's honestly much much better than this Baby Boomer sludge.
