In Black Spring the old charmer is back at work, charming again.'This man,this skull,this music'have good things in them, like a honeycomb. Henry Miller... reflects the light of joy and writes most sweetly.

Black Spring is vintage Miller. Continuing the subversive self-revelation begun in Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, he sucks us along at his mad, free-associating pace as he reverberates between America and Paris, transporting us from the damp grime of his Brooklyn youth to sun-splashed French caf6s and squalid Paris flats; from a winter night, pure as ammonia, to a dream where a woman's body has the strong white aroma of sorrow. Miller writes with an incomparable hard glee, shifting effortlessly from Vergil to venereal disease, from Rabelais to Roquefort, to the beauty of a statue defaced during a carnival; he captures like no one else the blending of people and the cities they inhabit, and Black Spring coheres in a seductive technicolor swirl of Paris and New York.