Rupert Owen reviewed Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller
Review of 'Colossus of Maroussi' on 'GoodReads'
5 stars
Every time I pick up a Henry Miller book through-out my life it is like meeting up with an old buddy for a long stroll and a gabber. One of the few authors I know well enough to be able to have an internal dialogue with as I’m reading. Just like a conversation over time The Colossus of Maroussi is alive with contradictions and Miller’s flare for embellishing each moment, his literary company is indeed after a few minutes like being “embarked on an endless voyage comparable in feeling and trajectory only to the dream which the practiced dreamer slips into like a bone into its socket”. In this book we discover Miller escaping the impending second world war by taking a holiday in Greece. Miller writes that it is his first real vacation in twenty years and that on it he would not do a stroke of work, yet …
Every time I pick up a Henry Miller book through-out my life it is like meeting up with an old buddy for a long stroll and a gabber. One of the few authors I know well enough to be able to have an internal dialogue with as I’m reading. Just like a conversation over time The Colossus of Maroussi is alive with contradictions and Miller’s flare for embellishing each moment, his literary company is indeed after a few minutes like being “embarked on an endless voyage comparable in feeling and trajectory only to the dream which the practiced dreamer slips into like a bone into its socket”. In this book we discover Miller escaping the impending second world war by taking a holiday in Greece. Miller writes that it is his first real vacation in twenty years and that on it he would not do a stroke of work, yet The Colossus of Maroussi was born from that workless period. Miller absorbs everything and so a workless time for him is purely intention and not action. The vacation also allowed Miller some time with his fellow writing pal Lawrence Durrell author of many books, “The Black Book” being the one of greatest interest to me.
So Miller explores Greece, the people and the ancient municipalities and landscape. He is thinking of the Greek people all the time, and of civilisation itself. This being the core of the work, but it is also a reflective piece on humankind and the nature of industrialisation and war. Some wonderful Miller observations like “We have but to melt, to dissolve, to swim in the solution. We are soluble fish and the world is an aquarium” and “It’s good to be just plain happy; it’s a little better to know that you’re happy; but to understand that you’re happy and to know why and how, in what way, because of concatenation of events or circumstances, and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss, and if you have any sense you ought to kill yourself on the spot and be done with it”.
One interesting moment was Miller’s visit to a soothsayer who told him that he wouldn’t die but vanish into the light. The forecast and Miller’s last hours are eerily copulative as Miller went back to Paris in the 1930s in his mind and perhaps really did just vanish into the light; his mind anyway.
Colossus of Maroussi is also a ramble on the many characters Henry encounters, and the legendary Greek places that bore the early triumphs of contemporary thoughts. There are a few classic Henry moments pertaining to his perverse wit but it is a book of potential fear, singular emotion and enormous transition from a writer's inner and outer world.
