Henry Miller - Sexus

It must have been a Thursday night. He, nearing thirty-three, an employee of a telegraph company and coldly married, met her at the ballroom. Suddenly, he was swept away by passion and certain that a new life was opening up before him: all he needed was the courage to risk everything.

Sexus is indeed a story of risk, of provocation, a vibrant prose, full of flesh and spirit, an account of sexual and literary adventures that extend from Brooklyn to bohemian Paris in the 1930s.

The first volume of the Rosicrucification trilogy, a fictional autobiography whose writing Henry Miller maintained for over a decade, this title was published in France in 1949 and for years circulated clandestinely throughout much of the world, where it was banned for immorality.

In the words of João Palma-Ferreira, who wrote the preface to the Portuguese edition, we are faced with "a masterpiece of all times". A masterful text by an author who is a stirrer of consciences, "an undisciplined individual eager for man to finally discover himself, without reservations and without making pacts with merely formal indifference."