Word: tropical
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...book, Tropic of Cancer is a soup, a whirlpool perhaps even a sewer. To make different order out of it is intensely difficult for the week-stomached, it is impossible. Characters and scenes float in and out of the with a wonderfully picaresque irregularity of Rabelaisian humor are broken off unexpectedly by passages approaching the drunken, frenzied poetry of a Rimbaud. Obscurity and philosophy, squalor and rhapsody are juxtaposed, crammed together, torn apart and tossed wildly, as if the book were the mixing bowl in which Miller, the mad chef, were preparing a salad -- to fling in the face...
...form any clear view of the book from many of its various parts taken separately is impossible, but it seems almost equally so when they are taken together. To comprehend just realize that Tropic is hardly a book at all, but a personality. Quite simply, the incidents and the monologues are the author's life (metaphorically if not literally) and are designed only to reveal him. Miller's personality is the sum and essence of his book. It is a terribly vivid personality. And if we give up the vain attempt to shove his book similiar pigeon-hole labelled "nihilist...
Henry Miller, the Tropic of Cancer, and the recent court decision banning the book in Massachusetts will be the topics of discussion at a special Winthrop House Forum next week...
...subcommittee reavealed that a B.U. English course on "Representative American Writers" listed Henry Miller's banned novel, "Tropic of Cancer" among four books of which students were required to read...
...reactions of the Attorney General and Judge Goldberg to Tropic show that they do not understand a book which they have banned. Shocked by Miller's words, they have not penetrated to Miller's meaning. At the trial, witnesses like Harry Levin tried to explain this; but in vain. And it seems certain that Levin's final statement was also in vain: "As a citizen of the Commonwealth, I would be ashamed to be denied the right to read a book talked about by the rest of the world...