![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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