It’s really rare when I get the chance to read a book someone advised me. It’s a shame cause I really like trying to understand the complexity of people’s tastes.
Reading has become an original habit. I remember reading during pauses in high school, and being looked upon like a freak.
Henry Miller was brought to me by my literary sister, and I could only understand her love for him as I went through the pages of Tropic of Cancer.
At first, I disliked it. I always dislike what i’m going to adore. That’s all part of the process. It was a bit as getting into Proust’s Rememberance of Things Past. It was really tricky for me to love Proust at first, with all his descriptions of society, the very tedious writing, the complexity of the long sentences… All that was different from everything I had read before. But after about twenty pages, I fell in love. It was a world of wonders. I always try to tell people to read Proust, without ever being able to explain why “à l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs” had me crying all the way. following him through fields of nostalgia.
I’m sure Henry Miller would be thrilled to be compared to Proust.
I first disliked Miller’s long shambolic monologues, I got bored, but I was still holding on, with the promise to find all the things that my sister had found in it.
Most people consider Henry Miller as a scandalous writer. With my narrow little mind, I thought that Henry Miller talked a bit about sex, about human smells and all those things that get clean little bourgeois people disgusted. But he’s so much more scandalous than that, actually. It’s not all the lines about whores, sex and mycoses that make the whole thing brilliantly controversial. It’s just the fact that he writes whatever goes through his mind, it is to me the first actual insight of what truly goes on in one’s mind. It made me feel like i was part of him, for a while, into this disgusting Paris, penniless and lonely. It’s his beautiful enthusiasm concerning all the wonders of life that is so controversial. He’s poor but he doesn’t complain, he writes every beautiful and disgusting thing that there is to write about our petty existences. I used to always quote Baudelaire in my essays in high school, cause i though it was fascinating what he wrote about the beautiful and the bizarre always mingling. Henry Miller made it much more important to me. All the beautiful, raw and disgusting things in this world.
I sucked everything out of that book, and was very glad I did. He encapsulated to perfectly the power of Paris, power of inspiration, power of destruction… The power of life, full stop.
Made me feel like getting back to Rememberance of Things Past. I’ll get to the intellectual and brilliant Paul Auster before that.
