Giving a book like this a star rating is not easy. I admit I sometimes found this attitude tiresome and weirdly snobbish in an inverted sort of way – though I got the point that being too comfortable might not be the most creative way to be. There’s the feeling that if you are not suffering, or living in poverty, or having extreme relationship dramas, you are not really getting through to the truth of things. These segments are by turns poetic, incomprehensible, and smug. The second Tropic of Cancer mode is a stream of consciousness style, where reflections and opinions tumble along wild tangents. My favourite is the one where he meets a turbulent Russian princess trying to make it as a film star. There’s the relatively straight-forward and frequently hilarious approach of sections describing Henry’s dealings with friends and acquaintances.

Tropic of Cancer basically has two modes. Even smiling makes my face ache.” There is a lot of that in Tropic of Cancer. At one point a disillusioned Frank moans: “It’s not easy having a good time. But after a while, even having fun becomes hard work. Furter flees his home planet and comes to Earth, hoping to do whatever he likes. So moving on from Emily in Paris, I also found myself reminded of the Rocky Horror Picture Show where alien Frank N. How does this American do? Well it’s all pretty chaotic, and with a crazy book I think it helps to make sense of it in terms of other things. Henry might not be self-controlled like Emily, but he is the product of a relatively repressed culture crashing into a society that is altogether more rakish. He is vaguely a writer, sometimes a proof reader, occasionally a teacher of English, who leaves his marriage in America to try and find artistic freedom in the hedonistic environs of Montparnasse. The American in this case is Henry Miller – yes the narrator has the same name as the author.

Tropic of Cancer is a similar idea, only taken to much more of an extreme. This gives humour to Emily’s situation, where a poised, self-possessed young woman from Chicago collides with louche Parisians. Oddly for a country which makes such a big deal of freedom, America is in many ways a morally conservative, sometimes puritanical country. When I read the book, it made me think, ironically, of Netflix comedy Emily in Paris.

Banned on grounds of obscenity, it was not published in the United States until 1961. Tropic of Cancer is a notorious novel from 1934 by the American writer Henry Miller.

Henry millers tropic of cancer