The 3 best books by Henry Miller

To find the origins of that disenchanted, hedonistic and transgressive literature that authors such as Bukowski, William burroughs o Kerouac, we have to go back a few years earlier. Because the forerunner of that countercultural movement was Henry Miller. Let's face it down to cruelty or demerit if need be. Henry Miller was the one who recovered the path of Marquis de Sade more than a century later in terms of all kinds of filias, no matter how bizarre they were.

Sex, perversions, vices and philosophy of survival in the trench that is life. Because if the Marquis de Sade devoted himself to indulging in sex, reaching its most marked edges. Henry Miller elaborated on it but also contributing that tinge of social criticism and existentialism from nothing more typical of a narrative from the last century of the millennium.

The beat generation necessarily relied on Miller, continuing to delve into the open, neglected and rotten wound as a gateway for a soul affected by a similar necrosis.

And once the American myth of this beat generation has been dismantled, it is essential for me to quote who was probably the greatest source of inspiration for Henry Miller. This is Louis-Ferdinand Céline, one of the most renowned French writers who, already in his novel Journey to the End of the Night, published in 1932, when Henry Miller was beginning to make a living in Paris, undoubtedly had to be a direct influence. thanks to his black humor, his stark vision of reality, his outrageous but fully accurate criticism and his presentation of characters that already offer that stridency between the subject and society with its conventions.

Top 3 best Henry Miller novels

Tropic of Cancer

The first novel by a guy like Henry Miller, full of concerns but already in a mature age where disappointment usually rules over fantasies, ended up being a success precisely because of that, because of his openness to the world as a guy hell-bent on awakening the conscience not towards the revolution but towards the grotesque and the tragic joke that is to think that something could make sense.

The only way out for absolute lucidity is the surrender to the physical, to the flash of orgasmic happiness, to the denial of hope as the only way to achieve calm in a vital becoming planned towards defeat.

Hence, the novel unfolds as a strenuous search for sex and its redemptive possibilities. Paris becomes, under the prism of Henry Miller, a wonderful city without a city, a purgatory made a city of light and passion where Miller sometimes stops to scrutinize the souls that cross history.

Black spring

The motives that led Henry Miller to this trip to Paris were built around an amalgam of fundamental life concerns.

But at the same time, the trip to Europe was a necessary escape from that contrast and that contradiction that the affirmation of maturity supposes as an absolute exercise of alienation with respect to the environment, customs and idiosyncrasy blown away by the author and finally abandoned as inconsistent. .

And when customs and routines take on that inconsistent aspect for the author, he has no choice but to search for new spaces. In this novel full of that autobiographical tinge with which cursed writers tend to approach their works, Henry Miller sails from one side of the Atlantic to the other, between his past and his childhood memories until his break with everything.

Despite this, the novel, built in independent fractions, support a magical chronology, evokes a search for identity as well as an affirmation of nihilism, builds intense images of delusional fantasy and lowers the mud of the most sordid reality in a balance fascinating that makes it a novel of existential epic.

Sex

We already know that sex is an element on which much of that realism pivots that seems to yearn, in the spasmodic aspect of sex, a point of contact with immortality, with the transcendent.

When the protagonist of this novel becomes entangled with a young woman in a sexual relationship with 9 points on the richter scale, the existence of both becomes a cataclysm that centralizes the entire plot but which in turn serves to tune in with a claim of the author to examine our society without limits.

With a persistent touch of acid humor, the philosophical vision of human relations in the shadow of social conventions, becomes a sociology treatise without thematic restrictions or preconditions.

Life can be analyzed from the explosion of a sexual encounter, and thus everything is seen with the liberating smile and the relaxation of body and thought. The ultimate truth may only be found after having a good fuck, when you feel capable of laughing at the world.