Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller

Be Brave - Tropic of Cancer

(Tr. Spa-Eng. from a review by Wangara) 

 Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. It's noon. The Sun is centred, magnanimous, in the clear sky; the breeze lulls the treetops and the flirty movement of the Seine River waters projects the translucent reflection, ghostly, of the bright star. The sight that is seen on the edges of the river contrasts spectacularly with the beauty of the landscape: a homeless man with torn clothing, dirt in the face and shit in his hands (the stench covers a wide circumference), is dying of syphilis. Dying in front of everyone. His face purple, with bulging bloodshot eyes, cries out for his martyrdom to end soon. He groans, bawls, screams, howls in pain. But his eyes never left, not even for a second, the majestic evening that hovered over him. The contrast between beauty and putrefaction. Henry Miller invites the reader on a fantastic journey, where, with exquisite mastery, he succeeds in demonstrating that a leprous world falling to pieces is an essential complement to that other world sublime, beautiful and pure.

 A journey where the reader gets disgusted up to vomiting and two lines later he cries moved. Crude and sordid naturism combined with subtle romance, full of tenderness. Written with passion and unbridled rage, Tropic of Cancer is a description of this American author's stay in Paris. There, living as a vagrant, he found out why the Seine River town appeals to the tortured, the deluded, the great love maniacs. And describes it for us with an eloquence that few writers possess. He tells us why in Paris we can embrace the most fantastic theories without them seeming strange. A city where everything takes on a new meaning and limits vanish.  

 No author had ever explored so masterfully the limits between the foul and the delicacy. Henry Miller shows that the charm of all perfection lies in the stench it radiates. A majestic work told by a person who even slept with hungry dogs under a beautiful bridge near the Seine green banks.