![]() Miller's personality is the sum and essence of his book. Quite simply, the incidents and the monologues are the author's life (metaphorically if not literally) and are designed only to reveal him. ![]() To comprehend just realize that Tropic is hardly a book at all, but a personality. To 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. Obsence protests are continually undercut by a laugh, despair by a ray of happy contentedness even the ferocious prophecies of the impending consummation of decay give off a strange feeling of hopeful But not even in obscenity or nihilistic frenzy do we find a bit of solid ground. 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 of the diners. ![]() 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. To make different order out of it is intensely difficult for the week-stomached, it is impossible. ![]() As a book, Tropic of Cancer is a soup, a whirlpool perhaps even a sewer. ![]()
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