The Nobel poet who brought back the Provencal language to his beloved Provence writes of his home and surroundings and his quartrains. If you love the childhood memories of Marcel Pagnol, you'll love this book too.

Henry Miller kind of arrived late to the whole expatriate game of the 1920's in which writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald blazed their way across the literary firmament. By the time Miller had gotten there, America was in the throws of the Great Depression and the shadow of Hitler was beginning to move across Europe. Miller moved to Paris at the instigation, or more likely, manipulation of his wife June. Soon after he met and began a long affair with Anais Nin. In 1935, Miller went to New York, his former home, in pursuit of Nin and produced Aller Retour New York, about his adventures in his old home city.

This book is actually a 77 page letter to his friend Alfred Perles back in Paris. On the surface it seems a letter of hate about the United States. Miller had found his place in France and after that, no other country could come close to him. They were all inferior. He resents the fact that America is new and has no real history. Miller feels more at home with decadence and rot and ruins, decay. He says that "nothing vital was ever begun here....nothing of value." He offers up critiques of the artistic types in Greewich Village by showing up the literary salon hags who vampire off of writers and artists. Miller hates technology and prophecizes about the time when skyscrapers will rule the horizons. I'm sure if he had lived to our day, he would have hated the internet and computers. Most of his hate seems artifical, maybe a defense mechanism that allows him to escape his past, for instance, the first wife and child that he abandoned. Or to do away with what he considers the past, he has to insult it. He has some nice descriptive passages and even though he wrote one thing, you can sense that underneath it, he enjoys writing about New York.

Aller Retour is very instructive in showing the underside of literature, in the sense that for every famous writer around back then, there was a Henry Miller type scumming around in the gutters looking for bare subsistence. It also offers nice vignettes of the artistic life of the time and a glimpse into the philosophy that he lived his life by.

Aller Retour New York.. This book was written between the time of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. If you are unknown to Henry Miller, I highly recommend that you read Tropic of Cancer first. In this short but good book, Miller reflects on the gay time he has while he is home visiting New York and getting ready to travel back to Paris. His writting style is more like a journal than a novel. He speeks of the I. State building.. the travel back on board a ship over the Atlantic... About the complete emptiness the sea cause a person to have.. about the mindnumbing boredom of life.. The entire novel is just one long letter which he continues over an extended period of time. I am an avid fan of millers way of writting because I connect so much to it, I hope you do too.