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Tropic of Cancer
- Narrated by: Campbell Scott
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
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Great Content; Would benefit from chapter names
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Fanntastic book but maybe not for everyone....
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Editorial reviews
Campbell Scott's narrative style has a unique stamp. His baseline technique in Tropic of Cancer is the dampening of his voice, joined with a masterly expressive control that emanates from this restriction. The effect is a quite strong sense of, and control over, mood and an intimate narrative connection with the individual listener. Scott's approach is suggestive of sotto voce, literarily "under speaking", similar to that bit of news spoken by a friend through a cupped hand in lowered tones into your ear in the Age of iPod, the narrator speaking through your earphones. Scott moves fluently from this baseline into the very lively stuff of Miller's tropes, riffs and rhetoric, and comically charmed outrages. Scott hits the marks, even as a tonal resonance of intimate communication remains constant. And Henry Miller's narrative voice? George Orwell observed, in his 1940 essay "Inside the Whale", "Read him for five pages, ten pages, and you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being understood. 'He knows all about me,' you feel. 'It is as though you could hear a voice speaking to you...with no humbug in it, no moral purpose, merely an implicit assumption that we are all alike.'"
With their production of Tropic of Cancer, Harper Audio and Campbell Scott have reached an elusive artistic benchmark: that point where the voice of the author and the voice of the narrator converge. David Chasey
Publisher's summary
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It is 1936, and on the East Side of Manhattan, a would-be writer named Don Birnam decides to have a drink. And then another, and then another, until he's in the midst of what becomes a five-day binge. A classic tale of one man's struggle with alcoholism, this revolutionary novel remains Charles Jackson's best-known book - a daring autobiographical work that paved the way for contemporary addiction literature.
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What a terrific audiobook!
- By Bill on 11-10-14
By: Charles Jackson
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Johnny Got His Gun
- By: Dalton Trumbo
- Narrated by: William Dufris
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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This was no ordinary war. This was a war to make the world safe for democracy. And if democracy was made safe, then nothing else mattered - not the millions of dead bodies, nor the thousands of ruined lives. This is no ordinary novel. This is the story of a young American soldier terribly maimed in World War I - he "survives" armless, legless, and faceless, but with his mind intact.
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READ THE INTRODUCTION LAST
- By Carollynn7 on 11-27-11
By: Dalton Trumbo
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A Fraction of the Whole
- By: Steve Toltz
- Narrated by: Colin McPhillamy, Craig Baldwin
- Length: 25 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Stewing in an Australian prison, Jasper Dean reflects on his relationship with his dead father and recounts the many zany adventures they shared together.
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A Funny and Thought-provoking Tale of Human Nature
- By Asha Ember on 01-27-10
By: Steve Toltz
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Stories
- All-New Tales
- By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, Al Sarrantonio - editor, Joe Hill, and others
- Narrated by: Anne Bobby, Jonathan Davis, Katherine Kellgren, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.
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Something for Everyone
- By Nicole on 05-24-17
By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, and others
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Giovanni's Room
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Dan Butler
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in the 1950’s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin’s now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
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Baldwin: sensational. Butler: great. One caveat.
- By Music Man on 06-28-14
By: James Baldwin
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Despair
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - 30 years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator.
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Russian emigre candy dandy murderers R my weakness
- By Darwin8u on 10-02-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Humboldt's Gift
- By: Saul Bellow
- Narrated by: Christopher Hurt
- Length: 18 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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For years, they were the best of friends: the grand, erratic Humboldt and the ambitious young Charlie. But now Humboldt has died a failure, and Charlie's success-ridden life has taken various turns for the worse. Then Humboldt acts from the grave to change Charlie's life: he has left Charlie something in his will.
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Great Book, Great Reader
- By Scott on 05-10-08
By: Saul Bellow
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A Woman in Berlin
- Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary
- By: Anonymous, Philip Boehm - translator
- Narrated by: Isabel Keating
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. The anonymous author depicts her fellow Berliners in all their humanity, as well as their cravenness, corrupted first by hunger and then by the Russians. A Woman in Berlin tells of the complex World War II relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject—the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age or infirmity.
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Interesting
- By northwoods woman on 06-25-20
By: Anonymous, and others
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House of Meetings
- By: Martin Amis
- Narrated by: Jeff Woodman
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic. House of Meetings is about one such liaison.
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Martin Amis at the height of his powers; wonderous
- By Todd on 06-16-15
By: Martin Amis
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My Tropic of Cancer: Living & Dying with a Dread Disease tells the story of cancer’s passage through three generations of the Mintie family. This deeply personal account relates the heartbreak, hope, and occasional hilarity that travel with any lethal diagnosis. Tropic includes gritty, day-today detail of the author's life as a cancer patient, and the wider environmental, social, and political milieus of cancer's appearance.
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Some of the most rewarding pages in Henry Miller's books concern his self-education as a writer. He tells, as few great writers ever have, how he set his goals, how he discovered the excitement of using words, how the books he read influenced him, and how he learned to draw on his own experience.
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Reader does not speak French
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Henry & June
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Anais Nin wrote her diary at the end of 1931, at the close of a sexually tumultuous and emotional year as part of a ménage a trois with fellow writer Henry Miller and his beautiful wife June Mansfield. 'I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife.' Nin's passionate and consuming relationship with Henry & June transformed a previously monogamous wife into an uninhibited and sexually liberated woman.
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Confusing Narrator
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The Unknown Henry Miller
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Henry Miller was one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century literature. Better known in Europe than in his native America for most of this career, he achieved international success and celebrity during the 1960s when his banned "Paris" books - beginning with Tropic of Cancer - were published here and judged by the Supreme Court not to be obscene. Until then he had toiled in relative obscurity and poverty.
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In-depth on the 2nd major phase of Miller's career
- By Jeremy Hatch on 12-12-17
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Paris 1928
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Henry Miller's Nexus was censored 50 years ago, while Miller and his publishers fought for freedom of speech. Nexus II was never published, and looks at his first trip to Paris and Europe in 1928, a world on the edge of the great depression. Paris 1928 collates these unpublished memoirs as Henry Miller wished, together with the censored pages from Nexus.
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Narrator is too cherubic to read Miller
- By Philharmonic on 08-22-19
By: Henry Miller
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Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
- By: Henry Miller
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- Length: 15 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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In his great triptych The Millennium, Bosch used oranges and other fruits to symbolize the delights of Paradise. Whence Henry Miller's title for this, one of his most appealing books; first published in 1957, it tells the story of Miller's life on the Big Sur, a section of the California coast where he lived for 15 years. Big Sur is the portrait of a place - one of the most colorful in the United States - and of the extraordinary people Miller knew there.
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I am one of the lucky few to live here in Big Sur
- By Adam H Rosenberg on 05-18-22
By: Henry Miller
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My Tropic of Cancer
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My Tropic of Cancer: Living & Dying with a Dread Disease tells the story of cancer’s passage through three generations of the Mintie family. This deeply personal account relates the heartbreak, hope, and occasional hilarity that travel with any lethal diagnosis. Tropic includes gritty, day-today detail of the author's life as a cancer patient, and the wider environmental, social, and political milieus of cancer's appearance.
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Reader does not speak French
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Anais Nin wrote her diary at the end of 1931, at the close of a sexually tumultuous and emotional year as part of a ménage a trois with fellow writer Henry Miller and his beautiful wife June Mansfield. 'I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife.' Nin's passionate and consuming relationship with Henry & June transformed a previously monogamous wife into an uninhibited and sexually liberated woman.
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Confusing Narrator
- By Lauren on 07-11-09
By: Anais Nin
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The Unknown Henry Miller
- A Seeker in Big Sur
- By: Arthur Hoyle
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 15 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Henry Miller was one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century literature. Better known in Europe than in his native America for most of this career, he achieved international success and celebrity during the 1960s when his banned "Paris" books - beginning with Tropic of Cancer - were published here and judged by the Supreme Court not to be obscene. Until then he had toiled in relative obscurity and poverty.
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In-depth on the 2nd major phase of Miller's career
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By: Arthur Hoyle
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The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
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The Diary of Anaïs Nin is the published version of Anaïs Nin's own private manuscript diary, which she began at age 11 in 1914 during a trip from Europe to New York with her mother and two brothers. Nin would later say she had begun the diary as a letter to her father, Cuban composer Joaquín Nin, who had abandoned the family a few years earlier.
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Beautiful perspective from an incredible woman, surrounded by difficult and incredible men
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loved the story
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The provocative novel about sex in suburbia, striking in its complete sexual frankness and rightly praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrayal of love, marriage and adultery in America.
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This book made me feel replete
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Originally published in 1936, this is Anaïs Nin's first work of fiction. But unlike her diaries and erotica, House of Incest does not detail the author's relationships with her famous lovers, nor does it contain graphic depiction of sex. Rather, it is a surrealistic look within the narrator's subconscious mind as she attempts to escape from a dream in which she is trapped, or in Nin's words, as she attempts to escape from "the woman's season in hell." Nin's usage of the word "incest" in this case is metaphorical, not literal.
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A little slow, and that bored me.
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By: Anaïs Nin
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Women in Love
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- Unabridged
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Lawrence explores love, sex, passion, and marriage through the eyes of two sisters, Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen. Intelligent, incisive, and observant, the two very different sisters pursue thrilling, torrid affairs with their lovers, Rupert and Gerald, while searching for more mature emotional relationships. Against a haunting World War I backdrop of coal mines, factories, and a beleaguered working class, Gudrun and Ursula's temperamental differences spark an ongoing debate regarding their society and their inner lives.
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A masterpiece
- By lois b on 01-28-23
By: D. H. Lawrence
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Fire
- From “A Journal of Love”: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1934--1937
- By: Anais Nin
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- Unabridged
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Drawing from the author's original, uncensored journals, Fire follows Anaïs Nin's journey as she attempts to liberate herself sexually, artistically, and emotionally. While referring to her relationships with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and author Henry Miller, as well as a new lover, the Peruvian Gonzalo More, she also reveals that her most passionate and enduring affair is with writing itself.
By: Anais Nin
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Journey to the End of the Night
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Louis-Ferdinand Celine's revulsion and anger at what he considered the idiocy and hypocrisy of society explodes from nearly every minute of this novel. Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty, and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the public in Europe, and later in America.
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Miserable Ride with Cynic Supreme
- By W Perry Hall on 03-15-17
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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
- By: Carson McCullers
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Carson McCullers was all of 23 when she published her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. She became an overnight literary sensation, and soon such authors as Tennessee Williams were calling her "the greatest prose writer that the South [has] produced." The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter tells an unforgettable tale of moral isolation in a small southern mill town in the 1930s.
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Do yourself a favor
- By Barbara on 06-08-05
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Lady Chatterley's Lover
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The story of Lady Chatterley and her love for her husband's gamekeeper outraged the sensibilities of Edwardian England. Lawrence had already been dismissed as a purveyor of the obscene for the attitudes to sex that he had shown in The Rainbow, which had been fiercely suppressed on its publication in 1915. Chatterley, written in several versions around 1928 in Italy in the final part of Lawrence's life, was a deliberate choice on the author's part to address sex head on.
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Amazing reader of classic great novel
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By: D. H. Lawrence
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Pale Fire
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A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.
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An amazing feat for such a unique novel
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By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Naked and the Dead
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Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War, The Naked and the Dead received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since become part of the American canon. This fiftieth anniversary edition features a new introduction created especially for the occasion by Norman Mailer.
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John Buffalo Mailer narrates his father's book
- By J. Larson on 08-11-16
By: Norman Mailer
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The Dharma Bums
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: Ethan Hawke
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- Unabridged
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First published in 1958, a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums stands as one of Jack Kerouac's most powerful and influential novels. The story focuses on two ebullient young Americans - mountaineer, poet, and Zen Buddhist Japhy Ryder, and Ray Smith, a zestful, innocent writer - whose quest for Truth leads them on a heroic odyssey, from marathon parties and poetry jam sessions in San Francisco's Bohemia to solitude and mountain climbing in the High Sierras.
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Lyrical Rendition
- By Michael E on 04-28-20
By: Jack Kerouac
What listeners say about Tropic of Cancer
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darwin8u
- 11-11-12
A madman who dances with lightening in his hands
“When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”
This is one of those amazing books that does violence to your system (think Lolita, Naked Lunch, Ulysses) but still leaves you gobsmacked by its brilliance. IT is the brazen, tortured soul of a man going through an existential crises in Paris. The novel is a cry in the dark; a delirious shout in the void. Miller's prose dances on the edge of the cracked mirror of Modernism. It is dazzling, sharp and extremely dangerous.
This is NOT a novel for the weak, the timid, the easily shocked or those that believe art exists (or should exist) without shadows. Miller lifts the sheets and describes the decay, the despair and the rot of humanity. If you are not prepared for the monstrous vision of Miller you won't be able to find the roses in the dung heap, and thus you will be unable to question your own desire for roses in the first place.
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47 people found this helpful
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Overall
- chris
- 09-15-08
Awesome
This is the same narrator for many audiobooks I've purchased. Initially, his voice sounds very monotone and boring but after a while it flows. I think this one is very well done. I tried to read this book several times in my life, but the audiobook makes it much easier to digest, listening to it 30 minutes here... 30 minutes there. on the way to work, while going to bed, etc. Great book.
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35 people found this helpful
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- Michael
- 01-20-18
Joyce-Like with desperation instead of magic
This has much of the feel of James Joyce, but lacks a magic I always get from Joyce. Here the character expresses a desire to unmake modern capitalistic society, but has no idea what to do instead. The book is permeated with an unstated fear of death, and worse, complete non-existence. There is a lot of crude language (mostly C#&T, but a lot of S#&T and F#&K), which many may find crude and uninteresting, if not offensive.
Some reviews seem to think this is a book is a celebration of life, instead it seemed to me a desperate striving for somethinness as the alternative is too fearful to consider. Others (including the protagonist) believe this is expressing the true essence of actual life. I get that essence from Joyce and Whitman but here the striving and the crudeness and the isolation and the immorality, seemed only a mask for fear. Fear is a reality, but it is not the only reality. I suppose that is the fundamental weakness I found in this novel, it was not multidimensional. Joyce and Whitman are frank, and sometimes dark, yet wonderfully multidimensional.
While I would recommend any Joyce and novels like A Clockwork Orange to my (adult) daughter or my wife, I would not recommend this one. I am quite glad I read it, and understand why it is considered important (particularly for the time) but I don't think reading it improved me or my life.
The narration was excellent expressing the dry striving of the protagonist.
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18 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Jennifer
- 01-19-09
a lexical magician!
You have to know what you're getting into with Henry Miller as his works may at times come across as utterly tasteless. For some people (myself incl.) those moments make me laugh so much I cry! Not a book to necessarily delve into in public places...but this author has a lexicon that is true genius.
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17 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Fernando
- 02-27-09
amazing book. horrible narrator.
the book has been bestowed so much praise already that nothing more can be said about it. it is simply perfect.
the narration on the other hand leaves MUCH to be desired. campbell scott has managed to deflate and take out the life of what is a joyful and celebratory book.
his monotone, droning voice is diametrically opposed to what the work is about. he brings a dour, somber, and exhausted tone to something that should be vibrant and alive. i imagine that henry miller would probably just want to punch him in the mouth.
what a waste of brilliant piece on such a poor narrator. after listening to Jeremy Irons ecstatic and euphoric read of Lolita this is a definite letdown.
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15 people found this helpful
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- Kelly
- 04-16-14
A great sordid classic
Would you consider the audio edition of Tropic of Cancer to be better than the print version?
Not entirely - only for the purpose of listening to it in my car.
What was one of the most memorable moments of Tropic of Cancer?
Van Norden's tirade about microphones in his trousers
Have you listened to any of Campbell Scott’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
No I haven't. Even though I like Campbell Scott as an actor and enjoyed his narration, I didn't feel that it matched what I expected, which was more of a Brooklyn accent.
Who was the most memorable character of Tropic of Cancer and why?
Mona stood out for me, as she was like a ghost, weaving in and out of the story. (Mona was based on Miller's second wife June - who was also like a ghost in his life). The other characters, including Henry, are quite sordid and hopeless.
Any additional comments?
Paris and the left bank, in the early 1900's, was often romanticized, and for the most part - rightly so. With 'Tropic of Cancer' though, you get it warts and all - the bed bugs, lice and cockroaches - the poverty, sleeping on straw, moldy cheeses and breads, rancid butter etc. The pendulum also swings to the other side where you have the 'swanky' side of life, the prostitutes, the sex, the great meals. You also have to wade through crap like women being referred to as 'c*nts' - however - believe me, it's worth it for the rhapsodizing and for the history. It's interesting, funny, has great dialogue and is a kind of sordid classic!
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11 people found this helpful
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- Darryl
- 07-08-12
Sorry but not for me
Supposedly this is an important work due to it's obscenity troubles etc. but aside from that, I didn't find it all that well written, I was not engaged by the characters, and ultimately I felt it was not worth the time and very over-rated. There is nothing here that I don't fell isn't better done by Nabokov, Joyce, Hemingway, etc. Can't recommend it nor do I intend to listen to more Miller if/when it becomes available. My time is better spent elsewhere.
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8 people found this helpful
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- DARRELL
- 04-08-12
So much poetry, so little plot
I had read this decades ago. I wasn't all that impressed. But hearing it read aloud makes the poetry come through. There is a lot of musing on life and Paris and friends: and that is lovely to listen to. There really isn't any plot, just some extended narrative and a few anecdotes. I thought the narrator did a good job of playing the observer that Henry Miller was. My only complaint was that it needed more chapter breaks.
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- Suzanne Jackels
- 11-08-10
Worst book I've ever read/listened to!
I'm going to assume this book is a classic because the language used was shocking in its day, but now it just seems crude and the storyline was boring beyond belief.
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- jeantoomer
- 05-14-16
Fabulous book, nice reading, terrible, many, guitar interludes
Love this book, but why oh why have the frequent elevator music jam band breakdowns?
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