Aller Retour New York

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Aller Retour New York
Black Spring
 

Aller Retour New York is a novel by American writer Henry Miller, published in 1935 by Obelisk Press in Paris, France.

Published after his breakthrough book

psychoanalyst Otto Rank. When Nin returned to Paris after a few months, Miller did so as well, with this book as his record of the visit.[1]

Literary critic Shaun O'Connell describes the book as "a litany of [Miller's] disenchantment with America," and Miller's view of New York as "the symbolic center of American corruption." Miller paints an unpleasant picture of a New York that, in Miller's eyes, is distinctly inferior to Paris.

antisemitic.[2] In his preface to a later French translation, Miller noted that he had modified some of the book's "harsh, seemingly unjustified references to the Jews", which he explained as a function of his "extravagant and reckless" youthful prose.[3] On the other hand, in a 1971 letter to his publisher, Miller rejected any charges of antisemitic content, although he also suggested delaying any reprint of the book while it "might rightly or wrongly create a bad impression".[4]

The book went out of print after 1945, but was reprinted by

New Directions Publishing in 1991 (and in a 1993 paperback edition). A critic for the British newspaper The Independent commented on the book's "blustering misogyny" and "racial swipes of the kind common to much pre-war American literature" but also observed that it had "some arresting moments."[5] Writing for Entertainment Weekly, critic Margot Mifflin described the book as a "springboard" for Miller's 1939 novel Tropic of Capricorn, "an uproarious critique of America" presaging Miller's 1945 book The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, and "a central document of Miller's picaresque life."[6] Critic Gerald Stern found the book, and its bigotry, to be "an attack on any kind of social action, even on hope", in which Miller "seems actually to hate everything, or really not to love anything" except a few people he meets.[2]

References

  1. ^ a b Shaun O'Connell, Remarkable, Unspeakable New York: A Literary History (New York: Beacon Press, 1997), pp.219–220, excerpt available online at Google Books.
  2. ^
    ISBN 978-1595341167, pp. 270-272. Excerpts available at Google Books
    .
  3. ISBN 978-0571294848
    , p. 248. Excerpts available at Google Books.
  4. ISBN 9780393038644, pp. 246-247. Excerpts available at Google Books
    .
  5. The Independent on Sunday
    , October 14, 2007.
  6. ^ Margot Mifflin, Book Review: Aller Retour New York Archived April 13, 2014, at the Wayback Machine, Entertainment Weekly, January 17, 1992.

External links

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