Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn

(Tr. Sp-Eng. from a review in Shvoong)

 After recounting her Parisian bohemian in the Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller (whose protagonist is always himself, by name) goes back to his life in New York during the early years of the twenties. Miller goes from job to job, disappointing his wife and stealing coins from the piggy bank of his daughter, and enjoying many sexual adventures (he portrays himself as a tireless stud) with women always prepared, even in pairs for the menage a trois. The employment in which he becomes more prosperous is as a personal selector for a telegraph company, where he has the chance to interview and give to guys so unreliable as himself a job that in most cases will last very few days. In addition, it serves as a key for new sexual adventures, sometimes cynical currency for selection. 

 Always minimum in terms of related events, the novel becomes, with the turning of pages, more intimate and lyrical in Miller's peculiar rough-poetic sense, which he expresses perfectly. Miller says he feels alive only for art and cannot find anything else in life worthwhile. 

 For him, the so-called gospel of work is nothing but a doctrine of inertia. "All I could see---he says---was that people busted their guts working because they could not do anything better". He states that "people are stupid by nature, lazy by nature, cowardly by nature", that "I never met a man who was truly wealthy or truly happy. I at least knew I was unhappy, that I was poor, that I was uprooted, out of place. That was my only solace, my only joy. But not enough". His rejection of customary society (sometimes tinged with a complacency that makes him suspicious of pure narcissistic snobbery) takes from time to time a course of  frank existentialism. 

 In another of his literary pearls he says: "I had so little need for God as he for me, and I often said to myself that if God existed, I would go to meet him calmly and spit in the face". Nevertheless, he shows a positive assessment of the human: "The most wonderful opportunity life deserves for me is the human being. It encompasses the entire universe. It includes the knowledge of death, which not even God enjoys"