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    Tropic of Capricorn
    Tropic of Capricorn
    Tropic of Capricorn
    Audiobook12 hours

    Tropic of Capricorn

    Written by Henry Miller

    Narrated by Campbell Scott

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    ""American literature today begins and ends with the meaning of what Miller has done."" — Lawrence Durrell

    ""There is nothing like Miller when he gets rolling. . . . One has to take the language back to Marlowe and Shakespeare before encountering a wealth of imagery equal in intensity."" — Norman Mailer

    Banned in America for almost thirty years because of its explicit sexual content, this companion book to Miller's Tropic of Cancer is a semi-autobiographical novel that chronicles Miller’s life in 1920s New York City. Famous for its frank portrayal of life in Brooklyn's neighborhoods and Miller's outrageous sexual exploits—from his teenage affair with a piano teacher twice his age to his tumultuous marriages—Tropic of Capricorn is now considered a cornerstone of modern literature. The audiobook is narrated by acclaimed actor Campbell Scott.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCaedmon
    Release dateMay 5, 2009
    ISBN9780061721472
    Tropic of Capricorn
    Author

    Henry Miller

    Henry Valentine Miller was born in New York City in 1891 and raised in Brooklyn. He lived in Europe, particularly Paris, Berlin, the south of France, and Greece; in New York; and in Beverly Glen, Big Sur, and Pacific Palisades, California where he died in 1980. He is also the author, among many other works, of Tropic of Capricorn, the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, Plexus, Nexus), and The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.

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    Reviews for Tropic of Capricorn

    3.5/5

    576 ratings18 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Firstly, the reader is superb. Scott Campbell captures both the laconic and the rhapsodic in Miller's voice. The book is great, a sort of spiritual tract seen through obscenity, euphoria and urban alienation.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This a Classic! Miller makes time work like a ball of play dough flexible, malleable and yet it has a weight that traps.
    • 2/5
      A stream of narrative instead of stream of consciousness. It doesn't work for me. I found it tedious and self-absorbed instead of insightful. His writing is often trite instead of clever. No doubt his sexual episodes were revolutionary at the time. Now they seem routine and misogynistic; even reminiscent of the ravings of Trump.
    • 4/5
      I liked Tropic of the Cancer better. This one started out well and end well, just the middle got a little overwhelming for me. There is no plot with this book at all, just the middle part he started talking about all these various women he's had sex with and it was something I really didn't care about. The beginning and the end however have a ton of inspiring quotes and material though. You get more of Miller's philosophy in this book.

      Unlike Cancer, Capricorn is set in New York City rather than Paris. Both books however focus on his inner thoughts towards various topics. These books are usually classified as erotica and yes the sex and langue can get very offensive. However, if you look at the soul of the book rather then the skin you will see why so many people, like me, have fallen in love with Miller's prose. This man could right some badass prose!

      If you ever do decided to read Miller's Tropics (that is if you don't mind colorful offensive slang and graphic sex scenes) I suggest you read Cancer first. There really isn't an order to these books and you can read either one first, but makes more sense if you read them in order he published them. I rally like Miller's style, but he's definitely an acquired taste.
    • 2/5
      Yes, yes, I know; this is a classic, one of the 1001 books to read before you die, Henry Miller is a genius blah blah blah. But, my God, this was dull!! Either I'm just not intellectual enough to 'get' Miller (though I enjoyed Tropic of Cancer), or the people who pronounced this a classic wanted to be perceived as intellectuals.

      Tropic of Capricorn starts off well. Miller comes across as a strangely self-aware narcissist, full of himself but also aware of his own shortcomings. He considers himself well-liked in his circles, though the character as written is, to me, wholly unlikeable. But the stories he tells, and the way he tells them, are good. The tales of his life at Western Union make for interesting, sometimes humorous, sometimes shocking, reading.

      But halfway through, we move from the autobiographical tone to abstract, stream-of-consciousness stuff, which I have to say, I found thoroughly dull. It's like he's run out of interesting things to say about his life so thought he'd pad out the book with the contents of his alcohol-fuelled dreams. Some may find that style of writing a good read. But it's not for me.

      So, having read both Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, my experience of Henry Miller is now at an end.
    • 2/5
      There were parts of Henry Miller's "Tropic of Capricorn" that were absolutely brilliant (such as his detailed description of his days working for a telegram company) and parts that were extremely disturbing (particularly the rape of an Egyptian woman that Miller gleefully recalls as a great time.) In this novel, Miller basically sets out to describe his early sexual escapades and his disillusionment with his marriage and American values, which eventually pushes him to become an ex-pat in Paris. I can definitely see the influence this book had on other writers (especially in the Beatnik circle,) but it was a struggle to read as Miller treats nearly everyone in his world like garbage. I definitely thought "Tropic of Cancer" was the better novel of the pair.
    • 2/5
      a bunch of dog vomit
    • 5/5
      10 out of 5 scale rating :)
    • 1/5
      This book went from a sexual romp to mental masturbation. Very self-indulgent. I didn't care about Henry Miller before I read this and now I care even less. If everyone had his philosophy, the world would devolve into total anarchy. He simply didn't care about anyone or anything but himself and how he could manipulate those around him to get what he wanted. What a pig.
    • 3/5
      It may be a companion piece to Tropic of Cancer, but make no mistake, This tantalizingly titled Tropic of Capricorn contains none of the engine of genius that drove its superior predecessor and caused me to rave that Henry Miller was like the reincarnation of Walt Whitman. Gone also is the humor that helped drive that book further home, and in its place lies inconsistent prose that never reaches Cancer's heights at its best and lapses into banality at its worst. In fact with this book, I rescind my comments that Henry Miller is the reincarnation of Walt Whitman. Here he looks a lot more like Jack Kerouac, a typist rather than an actual writer. Delve if you must, but beware of fetching titles: This is a beater with a new paint job.
    • 5/5
      It's been more than two years since I've read Cancer, but that work impressed itself upon me to the degree where I can still declare today that this is its equal, at the very least. This is very much the reverse of the same coin, pulling us back from the hero's Parisian days to his genesis, his childhood and his early adulthood, when Miller was building Miller, as he so eloquently illustrates and flat out proclaims at one point. The feverish ruminations here stretch a little longer than usual for him, and these fruits are sweet and rotten in equal parts, the lesser of them not marring the work as a whole. Aside from these two components, this volume seems to contain more explicit sex than Cancer, though even these passages are humorous or illuminating in their own way. Less of a plot than Cancer, similar in a way to Black Spring. At times Capricorn is more illuminating, and dare I say more fun, than either.
    • 4/5
      I have been reading Miller's books in spurts, and I can say that although I am not a real fan of his writtings, the story that is put before you and also implied, is nothing short of enthrolling. He has a very crude way of looking at the world, but I find that it is almost expected from him. The way he tries to objectify women is, in my eye, a sad attempt at protecting his heart from getting broken by another woman. Although I liked the book as a whole, he could, as usual get a little long winded.
    • 5/5
      I find it amusing that so many postmodernists feel that Henry Miller was a no-talent bum. They complain of Miller's use of the word "cunt" as well as his other expletives, saying they are not used creatively, such as Hollywood uses them today. They say his descriptions of sexual intercourse are dull, lifeless. They say so much more that reflects their own easy cynicism and allegiance to the lowly pissing jackals known as critics. "Tropic of Capricorn" reflected the world beautifully in the first hundred pages or so. I was fascinated by Miller's job, the way in which he acquired it, his co-workers, and most of all the people he dealt with day to day.By Miller not giving us pure autobiographies of "the truth and the only the truth", Miller succeeds in giving us an excess of truth. There is an underlying thread in all of his musings; what Robert Anton Wilson called i², e..g., intelligence which is perceiving of itself, knowing itself as unique, perceiving, and capable of creation. Miller is the type of guy my dad would probably says sits under trees all day. Miller is quite honest in telling us he is this type of guy. What is amazing in "Tropic of Capricorn" is not all the cunts and such, but the explanation by Miller of Miller. He is self-redeeming in this. This is why Henry Miller's writing gets bad reviews—he pisses people off with too clear of meaningful meaningless BS.As for those people who say that Miller is a lousy writer, George Orwell had this to say of Henry:"Here in my opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses."
    • 2/5
      Drinking, shagging, philiosophising. Fairly incoherent.
    • 4/5
      I thought this was Miller's best ... until, two-thirds of the way through, when he began rhapsodizing about world history and overindulged in philosophy. Much as I like Miller, it's clear that deep thinking was never his strong suit. Having been guided by Miller to other writers--Celine, Knut Hamsun, Anais Nin, Blaise Cendrars--as well as the art historian Elie Faure, he turned me on to Oswald Spengler. I spent a year reading and rereading Decline of the West, and even wrote an essay about it. In similar fashion, it seems to me that it was Spengler's influence that undid Capricorn--a case of admiration and imitation interfering with what Henry Miller does best: presenting an adventurous yet often everyday life in flowing, literate detail. As a result, what began as a great book became a very good one.
    • 3/5
      I think Miller is a very poignant and articulate writer. I read "Cancer" a while ago and remember enjoying it more than Capricorn. Although there are truly wonderful observations about life in 1930's New York, the stream-of-conscious narration proved to be too much for me this time around. At about the 208-page mark, I'm putting it back on the shelf.
    • 1/5
      Declaring yourself a genius is fine, but at least provide some evidence of it. Miller is misogynistic (and generally misanthropic), abusive, rude and arrogant. Although I don't think any book should be banned, this one was no great loss.
    • 2/5
      I think that this book may have caused a stir in 1938, I found it hard to read, not shocking and over all a struggle to keep turning pages.