Maybe I'm not smart enough or deep enough to appreciate a book like Tropic of Cancer, but for me each page was a tedious struggle. I got through the first 150 pages before I decided that life is too short to waste time reading books you hate. The beauty of this book lies somewhere else. I don’t know why publishers still insist on marketing this book for its “explicit language and breaking of sexual taboos in literature.” That’s just so passé in an age when even pornography makes us yawn. Who cares? Look at all that delicious writing instead, all the ranting and raving of a tormented and brilliant mind, and the brutal honesty of it. I don’t care if he slept with a whore and then stole her money and ran away. I didn’t bother with the morality of the hero. Is Lolita a bad book because it’s about a pedophile? Should writers feel like their characters will be competing in a popularity contest in the minds of the readers? Should we then only read books about angels floating happily in Heaven, doing good things? Aren’t evil and immorality – whatever they mean – facts of life that should be dissected and explained by literature? They ignore the book and get too tangled up in how likeable the characters are. I was like, don’t take it personally, lady he’s not your husband. Like when I was looking at the reviews of John Updike’s Run, Rabbit and saw a woman saying that she hated the book because Angstrom left his wife twice in the book. It always bewilders me when people judge a book according to the moral judgment that they pass on its characters. So, I was glancing through some of the reviews here and noticed that someone has totally disparaged this book because its “hero” is immoral.

Tropic of cancer book review