Black Spring
by Henry Miller
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Book Summary Information
Author: Henry MillerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1994-02-11
ISBN: 0802131824
Number of pages: 243
Publisher: Grove Press
Book Reviews of Black Spring
Book Review: Surreal Spring
Summary: 3 Stars
Do you know what a Mobius Strip is?
It is a math oddity...a surface with no outside or inside. Topology actually.
George Orwell gave this book an ambivalent review because of the "mickey mouse universe" created within its pages. The orderly socialist mind of Orwell could not follow the Mobius Strip of a story that turns upon itself rather than progresses to a fixed end from a known beginning.
This is a finely wrought mobius canvas created with splashes of colorful prose. This book is part of the trioka which includes Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn- Black Spring is the least popular and least sexual of the three. Hmmm....
When I read Miller I can not help but see the counterculture that followed his writing. It is as if Miller was the fetus that became the sixties and grew into the dirty old man of the post modern present. Miller was the staccato force behind Kerouac's typewriter and Vonnegut's grim images of burnt Dresden and a callow bomber crewman.
The images in this book are compelling...
I could see the decks being scrubbed down and the guns polished and the weight of those big sea monsters resting on the dirty glass lake of the basin was a luxurious weight on me. p7
Can't you feel the weight of the water and the ships?
Miller has always puzzled me. Influenced heavily by the King James Bible, Miller seemed immune to its message.
The racism in this book is rife..the n word, asians described as having "glass craniums" even a lurid description of a lynching in the mind of the narrator. Is it any wonder that the government tried to ban Miller's books under the Comstock Act?
Why did Miller feel it necessary to combine his beautiful prose with scatological slurs that seem to insult the reader for no reason? Here he compares the Trinity to sexual organs seemingly to create cheap marketing hype at the expense of his own integrity. Dali used to do the same with his paintings at strategic times at the expense of his integrity. Quality stands apart from hype.
Travel with enjoyment inside this Mobius Strip but realize that it ultimately ends where it began.. its surface is endless, aimless, Christless and perhaps self indulgent.
Summary of Black Spring
Continuing the subversive self-revelation begun in Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller takes readers along a mad, free-associating journey from the damp grime of his Brooklyn youth to the sun-splashed cafes and squalid flats of Paris. With incomparable glee, Miller shifts effortlessly from Virgil to venereal disease, from Rabelais to Roquefort. In this seductive technicolor swirl of Paris and New York, he captures like no one else the blending of people and the cities they inhabit.
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