Henry Miller, página 3 de 8

Romanzo in prima persona, o meglio vera e propria autobiografia con il ritmo narrativo di un romanzo, l'opera racconta, con linguaggio fluidamente realistico, la vita e le imprese dell'autore e dei suoi amici, aspiranti artisti, nei quartieri poveri della Parigi degli anni '30. Una storia piena di alberghi modesti, di stanze infestate dalle cimici, di risse e di sbornie ricorrenti, di emigrati, di truffe e di postriboli, ma soprattutto un'avventura umana di straordinario spessore, un simbolico viaggio lontano da tutte le convenzioni, alla scoperta della propria identità. Apparso nel 1934 a Parigi, il libro conquistò subito notorietà più per i suoi presunti contenuti pornografici che per il suo straordinario e innovativo valore letterario.

Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century.Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Millers masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Millers famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s.

Exposing the underbelly of Paris and its world of sex, prostitutes and destitution, the novel was, like most of Miller's novels, repressed in Britain and the USA due to its erotic content. Fortunately, this groundbreaking narrative, which captures the free-love spirit of a generation, has outlived its contemporary accusations of obscenity, demonstrating that stylistically and socially Henry Miller was ahead of his time.

Many people have castigated the shamelessness of the Tropic novels - which for a long time were widely suppressed and illicitly supplied under the counter - and have been at a loss to explain how their author could have simultaneously maintained a career as a serious essayist. In this book, Miller seeks to set the record straight and argues that there is no contradiction between his salacious novels and his philosophy. Throughout his pamphlet, Miller makes liberal use of raw language to narrate his own experiences as a young man and formulate his philosophical conclusions. Motivated both by a mischievous desire to shock and by a candid endeavour to achieve a crude and precise language, Miller triumphs thanks to his entertaining and seductive enthusiasm.

Written during the same period as "Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn", and banned in the English-speaking world upon its publication in Paris in 1936, "Black Spring" is one of Miller´s finest achievements, and arguably his most distinguished book from a stylistic point of view. It consists of a number of linked episodes describing some of the crucial years in his personal saga, from recollections of his childhood in Brooklyn to his time in Paris.Imbued with the spirit of Miller´s life experience, "Black Spring" is a linguistic tour de force which brings together the American author´s greatest merits.

The controversial‚ erotic and hilarious companion to the legendary Tropic of Cancer‚ in a smart new Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition. A riotous and explosive mixture of joys and frustrations‚ Tropic of Capricorn chronicles Miller′s early life in New York‚ from his repressive Brooklyn childhood spent amongst ′a galaxy of screwballs′ to frantic‚ hilarious years of dead−end jobs and innumerable erotic adventures. Irreverent and ironic‚ Tropic of Capricorn is both a comic portrait of the irrepressible Miller himself and a scathing attack on respectable America‚ the very foundations of which he hoped to shatter. The publication of Tropic of Capricorn and its sister−volume Tropic of Cancer in Paris in the 1930s was hailed by Samuel Beckett as ′a momentous event in the history of modern writing′. The books were subsequently banned in the UK and the USA for nearly thirty years.

Esta obra narra las peripecias de un álter ego del autor en Paris en los años previos a la segunda guerra mundial. El equilibio entre las peripecias de una vida bohemia (marcada por las experiencias sexuales y el desenfreno etílico) y las reflexiones acerca de la situación del ser humano individual en un mundo en crisis es uno de los aspectos que lo convirtió inmediatamente en una de las novelas más apreciadas por la crítica literaria de su época, y el hecho de que en Estados Unidos fuera prohibida por lo explícita que era en el relato de las relaciones sexuales hizo que también muy pronto surgiera un vivo interés entre los lectores. La mejor novela, la más espontánea, la más iconoclasta y que mejor refleja su tiempo. Carlos Manzano ha revisado la traducción en la que se restituyen algunos fragmentos eliminados en versiones anteriores.

Publicada en Francia en 1934 y prohibida en Estados Unidos hasta 1962, Trópico de Cáncer , primera novela de Henry Miller, nos trasnporta al París de entreguerras. Escrita en clave autobiográfica y partiendo del convencimiento de que la razon nos esta llevando a la catastrofe, Miller propone una emancipacion del cuerpo a traves de la filosofia de la inmediatez, del placer y el erotismo, del abandono, la irresponsabilidad y otros contravalores sociales.

Complementaria de Trópico de Cáncer, esta obra nos sitúa en los años inmediatamente anteriores a la etapa parisina del mismo personaje, en muy alto rado identificable como el propio autor. Tanto el tono y los temas como el estilo son muy similares, si bien en este caso el grueso de la novela lo ocupan las vicisitudes de un empleado de una importante compañía de telégrafos que subvierte todas las normas establecidas por la compañía y logra con ello, si no un funcionamiento mejor de la empresa (tampoco peor), que los empleados sean más felices. Junto a ello, de nuevo aparecen los diversos encuentros sexuales, que le alejan por momentos de la presencia de una esposa que se ha hecho ya insufrible, así como las relfexiones acerca de la degradación moral del ser humano en un época tecnificada que despersonaliza al hombre.