I was thinking about how much this reminded me of Burroughs, but an even more embittered and jaded version of it. It's more sad than sexy - at least to me. But Miller was caught in a particularly depressing part of history, in the post-Victorian depths of military-industrial gloom, desperately humping his way along, trying to forget for a moment his drab, wretched life. Lawrence to James Joyce to Miller, and from him on to the Beats like Ginsburg and then Burroughs and Tim Leary. The influence of this stuff is clear: I can see the lineage from William Blake to D.H. His experience remained fundamentally interesting to me, with moments of brilliance, but I found it ultimately depressing. The guy came off as a complete shit trying to justify his existence by waxing rhapsodic about all the rotten things he was doing.

Reviews say that Miller 'retains an ironic distance from his protagonist's racism and misogyny', but if so, it was invisible to me. After the first hundred pages or so, however, I reached the sex - and what mechanical, meaty grinding it was. It was a fine anticapitalist rant, and I wondered if this weren't the main reason for the book's being banned for such a long time.

Lawrence what I got was clearly related.Īt first I was intrigued by Miller's account of working for what he called the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company (based on his experience working for Western Union in New York in the 1920s). I was expecting something along the lines of William Burroughs or D.H. MalabarThis is the controversial 1939 book that was banned in the US for 30 years after its publication due to obscenity.

Tropic of capricorn book review