I know Henry Miller as a man who wrote about sex and scandalised the WASPs of America.  I haven’t actually read any of his books, but I have certainly heard about them, and the authors I admire have mentioned him fondly.

But I never read him because, well, I don’t often read American writers.  Simple as that.

The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder was an interesting book.  I expected sex – there was nothing.  I expected obsessive introspection – nope.  Instead, this was almost a fable, showing the life of a clown as he fails, and succeeds, and fails, and tries to help, and fails again.  I really liked it, but I suspect it isn’t representative of his larger body of work, and this suspicion was certainly reinforced by Miller’s own epilogue to the (very) small work, where he admits that he himself does not know where this little story of the clown Auguste came from.

The Books, Read page contains a list of all of the books I have read this year.