I read this novel in 1962 shortly after it got free of the censors and almost thirty years after it was first published in France. Now at 85 I have read it again. Readers who take it on should be prepared to tolerate frequent use of the C word, a few of the N word, occasional commentary that some might consider antisemitic, and a text containing more spiel than narrative. But there is humor, commentary on art, music and literature, some fine descriptions of Paris, some interesting characters and one or two tiresome ones. But mostly it is about Henry Miller, a New Yorker who lived and wrote in Paris in the early 1930s. This time through I found entertaining chapters and others quite wearisome, some powerful sentences and others that to me were trash.  Rather than writing the usual review I have extracted a few sentences for the prospective reader.

“I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”

“This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character.”

“There are people who cannot resist the desire to get into a cage with wild beasts and be mangled.”

“Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy.”

“I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures.”

“Europe—medieval, grotesque, monstrous: a symphony in B-mol.”

“Little urchins marked with the forceps.”

“… a whore all the way through and that was her virtue!”

“I have been ejected from the world like a cartridge…the earth is smeared with frozen grease.”

The City is palpitating “as if it were a heart just removed from a warm body.”

When “spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel he dwells in paradise.”

“I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free.”

“If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one. I go forth to fatten myself.”

“I am not an American any more, nor a New Yorker, and even less a European, or a Parisian.”

“…the world is a mad slaughterhouse.”

“The cradles of civilization are the putrid sinks of the world.”

“Drunk with this lecherous eczema of the future…”

“When the sun comes out any spot in Paris can look beautiful.”

“Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song.”

“No one to whom I can communicate even a fraction of my feelings….”

“Everything frozen tight as scum, the mind locked and rimed with frost, and through the melancholy bales of chitter-wit the chocking garble of louse eaten saints.”

“The thought of such absolute privacy is enough to drive me mad.”