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Tropic of Cancer

By: Henry Miller
Narrated by: Campbell Scott
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Publisher's summary

Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for 27 years after its first publication in Paris in 1943. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller's famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto, the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, "one of the 10 or 20 great novels of our century".
©1961 Grove Press, Inc. (P)2008 HarperCollins Publishers
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Editorial reviews

Tropic of Cancer is Henry Miller's 1934 "autobiography as novel" about the impoverished, middle-aged writer's expatriate sojourn in depression-era Paris and France. Banned in the US until 1961 for its sexual content, Tropic of Cancer has been and remains a literary classic of a unique sort. "A dirty book worth reading," Ezra Pound famously wrote, as he went on to compare it to James Joyce's Ulysses. Prominent 1930s literati including T. S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell joined in praising this non-literary, literary work.

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

What listeners say about Tropic of Cancer

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Awful bumper music

The music between chapters on this one is so bad and incongruous with the narrative it becomes something to dread whilst the story plods on.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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amazing novel by Miller

one of the greatest American novelists. tropic of cancer is a masterpiece. great narration of the novel. enjoyed it thoroughly.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Simply a work of genius

First time reading a Henry Miller novel, and wow, it burns with a ferocity and masculinity that is unmatched by much of his peers.

Truly a Provocative word slinger, Miller writes on the edge. His prose is fascinating and never dull. It's a whirlwind of a hallucinatory trip into the mind of someone constantly on the verge of losing it.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

What a wonderful time travel back to 1930s Paris

Great read - all time classic. Miller’s magical prose and realism are legendary and perfectly on display in this book.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

That drive to quell drive

A tale of a cad, a fairly week human, these follies that make up the vast majority of us. Ignore the course writing style and it, Tropic of Cancer, could supply the pieces that are left out of those masterpieces that cloak and suggest or allude to what drives all of us.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Fun writing style boring story

The story line revolving solely around a pathetic young man led through life by his cock didn’t really hold my interest. The writing style was more entertaining than the plot. Entertaining as far as surrealism goes but needed more substance.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

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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    4 out of 5 stars
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Miller's Paris

Good listen. The recording cuts off at the last word of every chapter... It sounds like it should continue, but when I checked my copy, I was reassured—It is unabridged. Overall would reccomend.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

A Vulgar Love Letter to Paris

This one was tough for me. Wildly vulgar (which doesn't bother me too much) and misogynistic (which bothers me very much) and yet also, in parts, a beautifully written love letter to Paris with many spot-on observations about expat life as an American abroad that feel as real now as when they were written in the '30s.

I'm not sure I would recommend it exactly but if you can get past the misogyny--I don't know if I would have been able to except that I had just finished American Psycho which is much much worse--maybe. I did find the last third less interesting that the first two-thirds but it was still worth finishing. Although the performance was very good.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Landmark in literature— not for everyone

I’m not the right audience for this book. It’s well-written, meaning the prose is outstanding and remarkable. But the narrative is a bit hard to follow, the characters are hard to get a grip on, and it’s... well I understand the prose is the point. I didn’t love it. I didn’t love the performance either. Sounds like he’s whispering the whole time kind of and they have a bunch of music stings that are in strange places in the text— mid paragraph for example.

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