"After everything had quietly sifted through my head a great peace came over me. Here, where the river gently winds through the girdle of hills, lies a soil so saturated with the past that however far back the mind roams one can never detach it from its human background."

I first read this book while in my 20s when I wasn't such a close reader and the romanticism of Henry Miller overshadowed anything he actually wrote. I wanted to be young and free and sexed in Paris. This used to be one of my favorite books to recommend not that I really cared if anyone read it, I was just so cool for recommending it. So I read this book now, in my thirties, to see if there was anything worth keeping beyond the personality of the book.

Certainly the appeal of being hungover in a flea bag motel without any money has worn off the most. Probably because once you've been hungover in a flea bag motel without any money you realize how distinctly uncool any of it actually is. Miller's prose flows on like the Seine and at times he merely seems to be rambling but at others, when he has caught certain elements of an actual narrative, the writing is transcendent.

I'm a little pickier now about what I consider to be good fiction and this book doesn't cut it for me. However, that isn't to say it isn't wonderful on it's own terms. If you've never read anything by Miller this is worth the read. The particular timbre of an American stream-of-conscious: it's doubt, it's passion, and it's vulgarity, is an important voice for anyone to hear. We suffer apart from our European or Asian contemporaries and I think Tropic of Cancer captures that suffering very well.

The lines on this book typically mention just how honest it is. It is an honest book, they say. I don't understand that (sign of the times?) but perhaps they mean this is an emotionally appealing book. From my 10 years ago to today that is what has remained when all else has dropped away. Tropic of Cancer begs its readers to drop all conceit and examine, emotionally, what shapes we are.