La sonrisa vertical

Naughty madness, how I love the man of rants, letters, and contradictions. ( )

I read Tropic of Cancer a few decades ago - this book certainly has the same flavor. Our narrator is jumping from whoring to dumpster diving, back and forth. It's a bit shocking still even today - I can't quite imagine the impact at the time of publication. But it is hardly pornography. Maybe the point is that the sublime inheres in the sordid much more than in the banal. There is a kind of raw honesty here.

There is a zen koan, an old woman burns down a hermitage. Do we acknowledge our sexuality, our animality, our passion, in our meditation, in our probing of the ultimate nature of reality? Perhaps these works of Henry Miller are a commentary on that koan?! ( )

Les deux courtes histoires que comporte "Jours tranquilles à Clichy" de Henry Miller nous plongent dans le Paris animé des années 1930 : bars, bordels et filles faciles, dans une ambiance tour à tour joyeuse, hystérique, désespérée, hallucinée, enivrée, érotique, lourde ou pesante, mais toujours dans une langue colorée et visuelle. Quand l'Amérique d'avant-guerre découvre la Ville Lumières. ( )

Henry Miller beschreibt in diesem Werk das Leben zweier Schriftsteller im Paris der 1930er Jahre, hauptsächlich ihre sexuellen Abenteuer.
Ich fand das Buch zum Teil sehr erotisch, konnt aber ansonsten nicht viel damit anfangen. ( )