Customer Reviews (4)

Not very impressive
Boring and poorly written.The reason I bought this one because I have been miled by reading the othere's reviews.It may be a good book for others but certainly not for me.

A must read...
For me this book read like a collage of images strung together seamlessly by a multitude of characters in differing places...Places that Renate traveled to, lived in, loved in and much more...Once again, with Anais' mellifluous word usage, I felt like I was right there traveling with her - Savannah Skye...

Her best fiction
I can't reasonably express how beautiful this book is. It was my first Nin reading and remains my favorite among her fiction. In my opinion, her prose and story in Collages is at its strongest and most moving. This work shows the heart of a poet.

.......
This book left me speechless....a whole new mode of thinking... ... Read more

Book Description
Written when Anaïs Nin was in her twenties and living in Louveciennes, France, these stories contain many elements that will delight her readers: details remembered from childhood, of life in Paris, the cafés, theatres; characters including dancers, artists, writers, women who devote themselves to their work and visions as well as romance, strangers met in the night; themes such as the scruples of lovers, the search for brilliant, imaginative living; the writer’s experimentation with exotic words like "sybaritic" and "violaceous". In the craft of these stories readers are treated to a deft sense of humor, ironic wit, much conversation as well as ecstatic prose, and surprise endings. Throughout all, the Nin personality shines, a wonderful mixture of feeling and rationality, of vulnerability and strength. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A thin volume of black-and-white photos
PHOTOGRAPHIC SUPPLEMENT TO THE DIARY OF ANAIS NIN is a thin volume of black-and-white photos that accompanied the first group of her published diaries. The new "unexpurgated" versions usually have pictures in the volumes of diaries themselves.

I enjoyed this book because it adds a level of understanding to be able to see pictures of the people that Anais is writing about, including herself. I had no idea who Anais was before I found this book, and it made me interested in her. My favorite shots are of her in Cuba, Mexico, and on her house boat in Paris. She really was a beautiful woman.

Andrew Parodi

A thin volume of black-and-white photos
PHOTOGRAPHIC SUPPLEMENT TO THE DIARY OF ANAIS NIN is a thin volume of black-and-white photos that accompanied the first group of her published diaries. The new "unexpurgated" versions usually have pictures in the volumes of diaries themselves.

I enjoyed this book because it adds a level of understanding to be able to see pictures of the people that Anais is writing about, including herself. I had no idea who Anais was before I found this book, and it made me interested in her. My favorite shots are of her in Cuba, Mexico, and on her house boat in Paris. She really was a beautiful woman. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (8)

Henry Miller
Big fan of these two, but more of a Henry Miller fan personally. The letters bring Henry Miller out of his fiction/novels and bring him into the realm where Nin was in writing her Diaries. Good for that reason, two lovers but volatile ones. Testing sexual boundaries is a touchy thing, after all.

Yes! Ah, ah, yes!
Forget Nin's works of fiction, the journals, letters, and life are truly worth experiencing over and over again for their honesty, passion, and viewing the internal turned external for our benefit. Everyone knows of Miller's and Nin's relationhip, through "Henryand June" if anything, but it is through this work that we see them less as romantic figures andmore as humans capable of the idiocy, devotion, and prolongation of things we should all end and just don't for whatever reason. This is a great buy if you are a lover a letters. Reading "Fire" is a must, however.

Spying In The House of Love
Like many others, I have been fascinated with and frustrated by Anais Nin for many years, since reading the first volume of her expurgated diary in 1977.

This volume of letters enables the reader who has already read other versions of the Nin-Miller story to form additional conclusions about what might actually have happened. Because the letters were sent into the possession of others, they were less subject to the constant revision and reinvention that bedevils all attempts to determine objective facts about the mercurial Nin.

If you are not already an amateur historian of literary trends of the 1930's, fear not. The letters are worth reading as an introduction to Anais Nin and Henry Miller as well, for they depict a real-life romance conducted by two who absolutely relished the game and were highly articulate in dramatically different ways.

The Language of Sexual Liberation
Whatever you may think of her writing, Anaïs Nin was definitely a femme fatale.Henry Miller was, he claimed, the "happiest man alive."Together, Nin and Miller created a literary language for sexual fulfillment; she in a diary whose original form still remains unpublished, he in novels banned in both the United States and England until court cases in the early 1960s permitted their publication and turned Miller into something Nin had already achieved:the status of a cult hero.

Nin and Miller met in Paris in 1931.Miller, an aspiring novelist, wanted to meet the banker's pretty wife who had sung the praises of D.H. Lawrence and whose books had been deemed "pornography" outside of France.Neither Nin nor Miller, at that point, had published much.Their mutual interest, as they freely admit, was in sex and in each other and, consequently, they began a long affair.

It was during this affair that both Nin and Miller produced their finest writing--the writings that would eventually become Nin's two diaries and her novel, House of Incest, as well as Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring.Each believed in, and nurtured, the others genius and Miller wrote that Nin's diary would take its place "beside the revelations of St. Augustine, Petronius, Abelard, Proust and others."

Miller, only forty-one, but already somewhat down-and-out, fascinated the twenty-nine year old Nin, whose vague yearnings filled the many pages of the diary she had been keeping since the age of ten."He's a man who makes life drunk.He is like me," she mused.Nin and Miller, however, were not alike.One of their most essential differences was a difference typical between men and women--Nin censored herself, while the world censored Miller.

Published in 1963, Nin's diary caused a literary sensation.It was begun as a letter to her father, a man who abandoned the family when Nin was only ten, and it remained intensely private.Revised into frequent distortions, the diary was a record of a compulsion to conceal as much as of a quest for feminine fulfillment.A mixture of fact, fantasy and calculated lies, Nin's editor asserts that the diary nevertheless presents a "psychological" truth.Kate Millett hailed Nin as "the mother of us all" and the women's movement immediately embraced her writings.Author Erica Jong said that no woman had told "the story of women's sexuality" more honestly than had Nin.

Despite the praise, if we read between the lines, while still observing Nin's frenetic whirl from bed to bed, we come to realize that she was really never satisfied. Her insatiable appetite aside, Nin was, at heart, a prudish libertine.Her childhood molestation by her father, whom she, herself, seduced as an adult a year after meeting Henry Miller, seems to have contributed greatly to her private inhibitions.Although she flitted from bed to bed she sadly confessed, "I am hellishly lonely."Instead of sex, Nin longed for "what I give Henry:this constant attentiveness."

In the "Black Lace Laboratory," as Miller's apartment was dubbed, Nin and Miller conducted literary and erotic experiments, prompting Nin to write him a thinly disguised warning to herself, "Beware just a little of your hypersexuality!"Toward the end of his life, unable to write about women except as prostitutes, Miller claimed not to know what the sexual revolution was about, saying that he had always loved and honored women.Nin agreed, saying that Miller was a romantic, rather than a rake.At eighty, Miller confessed that far too many people engaged in sex without love.

Basking in the warmth of Nin's caresses, her skilled editing of his work, and the material possessions she lavished upon him, Miller wrote prolifically and with a rare genius.Eventually, his romance with Nin faded (or warmed) into friendship, but the legacy of their literary teamwork remained:In 1974, Nin was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.The Los Angeles Times names her Woman of the Year in 1976, the same year Henry Miller received France's Legion d'honneur.The 1990 movie, Henry and June is a chronicle of Miller's affair with Nin, which later became a triangle involving Miller's wife, June.

Nin and Miller have become cultural icons.Nin is the focus of women's study courses as well as being included in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.Miller and his work need no comment.Although both Nin and Miller were pioneers of free speech and sexual freedom, and both helped to forge a new literature and a new culture, the ultimate emptiness of their lives, with its attendant lack of depth and meaning point to the futility of their attempt to wrest security and happiness from sexuality alone.

Immerse yourself
How much deeper can you get into a person's complexities and simplicities, understand the origin of their joys and frustrations, their motivators and their fears, if not by reading the letters they wrote to one another, and, in this case, one of their best friends and lovers?

This is a powerful door to Anais' heart and soul, and even more powerful than her diaries itself. Because here you get deep into one of the most significant periods of her life, the many years she let her own life and self entwined with Henry Miller's.

Indispensable reading for anyone, even more for those who admire Anais and Miller as ordinary people who loved each other, or as writers ahead of their time, unafraid of other people's opinions.

Immerse yourself: you're gonna want to sink. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

So Near And Yet So Far
This unexpurgated volume of Anais Nin's diary contains entries from March 4, 1937 to October 23, 1939. The preface by Rupert Pole (her Los Angeles widower, as opposed to the late Hugh Guiler, her New York widower) notes, "Toward the end of her life Anais and I discussed the original diaries, and she asked me to publish all her diaries just as she wrote them."

Having now read four volumes of the unexpurgated diary, it is my educated opinion that this was _not_ a good idea. It is unfortunate that Pole has dutifully released this volume of material in this form. It's like he published the first draft of a book--there is so much dross among the gold that I often felt that I was not so much reading as doing penance. It is apparent now that not all the material cut from the expurgated volumes was eliminated because of its scandalousness. If we have learned anything after the sexual revolution, surely it is that even the salacious can be dull.

And yet. And yet. Amidst Nin's whiny posturing, her mechanical proclamations of audacity and innocence, nestle passages of such power and beauty (especially starting in 1938) that this volume intermittently becomes riveting. There are also a number of entries where Nin drops her self-glorifying posturing and looks at her own behavior with clear and unflinching eyes. For the first time, for example, I began to understand what she saw in Gonzalo, something that was a mystery to me even from the previous unexpurgated volumes. She becomes enormously likeable when she appears to be displaying some candor.

I regard it as truly unfortunate that this book is unlikely to have many readers owing to its lack of editorial discipline. Be patient with it, but be prepared to skim, and don't read it as an introduction to Nin's work.

beautiful and inspiring
nearer the moon is a book whic has affected my life in so many good ways.I have become a better lyricist, and a more insightful poet because of her ability to be so bold, honest, and real while being one of the greatistpoets and writers of our time.Anais Nin's writting not only stands asarepresentation of how beautiful life is, but also stands as a bench mark inhistory.We can look into our past and see when her writing was rejectedfrom culture and society, and see how far we've come.Through Anais Nin wecan actully see Americas liberation process. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Evocative
Evocative, dreamlike portrayal of woman and soul. Much substance, deeply layered.Imagery is gritty, beautiful, real, and stylish simultaneously. Everything is described until you feel dreams are tanglible. Bless youAnais!! ... Read more

Book Description

From her famous diaries, that she began in 1914 at the age of eleven, Anais Nin reads passages which reflect the recurring themes of her work. In a slow, clear, heavily accented, hypnotic voice, Nin draws the listener into her spell–binding stories of a highly personal world as she paints a vivid picture of a woman as artist and self. This is an extraordinary, historic, archival, and memorable recording which speaks in a fresh voice to new generations.