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The Diary of Anaïs Nin #5
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955
The author's experiences in Mexico, California, New York, and Paris, her psychoanalysis, and her experiment with LSD. "Through her own struggling and dazzling courage [Nin has] shown women groping with and growing with the world" (Minneapolis Tribune). Edited and with a Preface by Gunther Stuhlmann; Index.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1966
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About the author
Anaïs Nin
355 books8,882 followersWriter and diarist, born in Paris to a Catalan father and a Danish mother, Anaïs Nin spent many of her early years with Cuban relatives. Later a naturalized American citizen, she lived and worked in Paris, New York and Los Angeles. Author of avant-garde novels in the French surrealistic style and collections of erotica, she is best known for her life and times in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volumes I-VII (1966-1980).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana%C3%...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana%C3%...
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
April 13, 2014
I found this book at the local bookstore, so this was the first volume of her diaries that I read. (I have also read parts of Delta of Venus which I wasn't crazy about.) I'm so happy to have found it because it is EASILY one of the most important books I have ever read. Besides the fact that I'd do basically anything to have her life, I adore her descriptions and her mind. She conveys such complex emotions and ideas so concisely, especially when it comes to life as an artist in the United States. She meets so many interesting people and I have so much respect for her (extremely!) romantic/humanistic perspectives. I'm on the look-out for her other journals and my journal is now filled with quotes from this one.
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June 4, 2024“A white world outside. Clarity. Clarity. Recently I cannot bear the white expanse of my lucidities. Everyone else around me descends into chaos, inchoate lethargy, into fogs of the mind, temporary releases from lucidity. Some links, some bridges sustained and maintained by great effort are slipping from me. No rest, no refuge, no escape, no pause from awareness. A diamond lodged in the head, the unblinking eye of the clairvoyant.”
The five star system on this website doesn’t really work for some books I’ve realised. Because we have left ‘Anais is a little bit older than me’ territory and entered… I don’t know. I don’t recognise these new halls.
On the one hand, this volume of the diary is shockingly mundane. It felt like Anais spent most of this book either:
A) In Mexico, crafting exotic images, completely blind to her own naïveté,
B) Despairing that her writing was not getting the recognition it deserved in the States
C) Out and about with her ever changing circle of new friends and connections, who started to blur in my mind, interesting as I’m sure they were.
On the other hand—I felt, especially towards the end of the volume, following the death of her mother— that a deep peace was settling around her. She says as much herself. She’s back in analysis, this time with a female doctor, and she believes she has finally left her neurosis behind. She finally returns to Paris and finds it less damaged than she feared. Henry Miller is happily painting watercolours in Big Sur. She has left June, Helba, Gonzalo and all their endless troubles behind. She has ceased to need their little drama.
It’s a work that confounds a star-based rating system, because as much as I want to give this book three stars for just how boring it got in the middle, I also feel that I will read the next volume of the diary in a decade or two, and it will really mean something to me then, just as this volume might have been more to me if I had heeded my confusion about Volume 4 and given the diaries a break.
The five star system on this website doesn’t really work for some books I’ve realised. Because we have left ‘Anais is a little bit older than me’ territory and entered… I don’t know. I don’t recognise these new halls.
On the one hand, this volume of the diary is shockingly mundane. It felt like Anais spent most of this book either:
A) In Mexico, crafting exotic images, completely blind to her own naïveté,
B) Despairing that her writing was not getting the recognition it deserved in the States
C) Out and about with her ever changing circle of new friends and connections, who started to blur in my mind, interesting as I’m sure they were.
On the other hand—I felt, especially towards the end of the volume, following the death of her mother— that a deep peace was settling around her. She says as much herself. She’s back in analysis, this time with a female doctor, and she believes she has finally left her neurosis behind. She finally returns to Paris and finds it less damaged than she feared. Henry Miller is happily painting watercolours in Big Sur. She has left June, Helba, Gonzalo and all their endless troubles behind. She has ceased to need their little drama.
It’s a work that confounds a star-based rating system, because as much as I want to give this book three stars for just how boring it got in the middle, I also feel that I will read the next volume of the diary in a decade or two, and it will really mean something to me then, just as this volume might have been more to me if I had heeded my confusion about Volume 4 and given the diaries a break.
December 19, 2018
mature anais - no more hunger to seduce every man she encounters, like how she consciously chooses a woman psychotherapist because she feels as though she can't help but to charm when she has a male doctor, her rejection of passive experiences (LSD, movies) - which leads her to an understanding of her own alchemy - transmuting her reality into dreams & dreams into reality...
December 29, 2008
i think this is the one where anis moves to california, partially based on the recommendation of henry miller, who is chilling in big sur & doing a lot of watercolors at this point. that really cracks me up, in light of what a macho tool he was in the first volume of the diary. i wonder if he ever thought he'd be hanging around redwood trees painting watercolors. haha! meanwhile, anais is doing her thing, socializing with film industry types, surviving wildfires, & the like. this volume is a bit fuzzy in my memory.
July 11, 2015
Anais Nin is my favorite writer and has had such an impact on me as an artist, writer, and woman in the world. Her scope is wide, capturing things happening around the world, but it is also dazzling when it zeroes in on the people, places, and events occurring in her own orbit. Her depth of understanding about human nature, her willingness to write her own insecurities, feelings, desires, and observations of the world and people around her, her gorgeous prose- they satisfy on so many levels.
Anais Nin lived life on her own terms, and documented it in these magical, one of a kind diaries. She was ahead of her time. I adore her.
I have a personal story about how I was able to give back to her after she has given so much to me, but I cannot write about it here.
Anais Nin lived life on her own terms, and documented it in these magical, one of a kind diaries. She was ahead of her time. I adore her.
I have a personal story about how I was able to give back to her after she has given so much to me, but I cannot write about it here.
October 28, 2016
A slog but I loved so much of it. Although she is kind of entitled and overly esoteric and a touch haughty, we should all be so lucky to look at the world and interact with it in the way she did.
M
M
September 1, 2013
lovely! she makes you yearn for whatever she describes, whatever she tastes, whatever she hears, whatever she tastes..
September 24, 2015
Gorgeous prose. I found it worth reading for the language, polished, jewel-like, rather than any profundity in the text. Still, it makes me want to read other parts of her diary.
August 3, 2023
“Sono sdraiata su un’amaca, sulla terrazza della mia stanza all’Hotel Mirador, col diario aperto sulle ginocchia, la luce del sole sul diario e nessuna voglia di scrivere.”
Lasciatasi alla spalle la grigia e fredda New York, Anais Nïn approda ad Acapulco, decisa a ricongiungersi con la terra, con la semplicità dello sguardo genuino e scanzonato dei messicani, apparentemente privi di sovrastrutture.
Quella vita, lenta e colorata, intorpidisce la mente, ma scatena i sensi, fa provare alla scrittrice americana una nuova e dolce vitalità, legata com’è ad una realtà di sogno, in cui la modernità e le esigenze della città sembrano assolutamente fuori posto.
Ma l’animo artistico di Nïn non può accontentarsi solo di ammirare con gli occhi quel mondo a sé stante che è il Messico: ha bisogno di scrivere, di nutrirsi di arte, di respirare l’ammirazione dei suoi lettori.
“Nessuna tregua per me, da nessuna parte. Nessuna tregua dalla scrittura, dalla consapevolezza, dalle intuizioni, dai ricordi, dalle fantasie, dalla analogie, dalle libere associazioni. Scrivere diventa imperativo per una testa sovraccarica.”
Tornare a New York diventa, dunque, necessario: la scrittrice americana si trova, così, nuovamente immersa nell’ambiente snob e freddamente realista dell’America appena riemersa dalla seconda guerra mondiale e nel quale non sembra esserci spazio per il suo progetto letterario all’insegna della riscoperta della nevrosi nell’essere umano, mostrato così ai lettori in tutta la sua primigenia debolezza.
Lo stile puramente simbolico e lirico delle opere di Nïn attira sulle sue opere le più aspre recensioni, capaci di colpirla al cuore: dove ella cerca calore, trova intorno a sé solo indifferenza. Il suo lirismo del subconscio, infatti, raccoglie intorno a sé pochi proseliti, mentre viene disdegnato apertamente dalle masse e dai critici.
Continua a leggere qui: https://parlaredilibri.wordpress.com/...
Lasciatasi alla spalle la grigia e fredda New York, Anais Nïn approda ad Acapulco, decisa a ricongiungersi con la terra, con la semplicità dello sguardo genuino e scanzonato dei messicani, apparentemente privi di sovrastrutture.
Quella vita, lenta e colorata, intorpidisce la mente, ma scatena i sensi, fa provare alla scrittrice americana una nuova e dolce vitalità, legata com’è ad una realtà di sogno, in cui la modernità e le esigenze della città sembrano assolutamente fuori posto.
Ma l’animo artistico di Nïn non può accontentarsi solo di ammirare con gli occhi quel mondo a sé stante che è il Messico: ha bisogno di scrivere, di nutrirsi di arte, di respirare l’ammirazione dei suoi lettori.
“Nessuna tregua per me, da nessuna parte. Nessuna tregua dalla scrittura, dalla consapevolezza, dalle intuizioni, dai ricordi, dalle fantasie, dalla analogie, dalle libere associazioni. Scrivere diventa imperativo per una testa sovraccarica.”
Tornare a New York diventa, dunque, necessario: la scrittrice americana si trova, così, nuovamente immersa nell’ambiente snob e freddamente realista dell’America appena riemersa dalla seconda guerra mondiale e nel quale non sembra esserci spazio per il suo progetto letterario all’insegna della riscoperta della nevrosi nell’essere umano, mostrato così ai lettori in tutta la sua primigenia debolezza.
Lo stile puramente simbolico e lirico delle opere di Nïn attira sulle sue opere le più aspre recensioni, capaci di colpirla al cuore: dove ella cerca calore, trova intorno a sé solo indifferenza. Il suo lirismo del subconscio, infatti, raccoglie intorno a sé pochi proseliti, mentre viene disdegnato apertamente dalle masse e dai critici.
Continua a leggere qui: https://parlaredilibri.wordpress.com/...
January 23, 2025
Ho cominciato e smesso, ripreso, due pagine e abbandonato, poi natale, lazzi e frizzi, rileggevo e smettevo, addirittura trovandolo noioso.
Poi in un giorno nero, per tigna riprendo. Per ‘cura’: i libri, si sa, sanno farlo quasi sempre.
Tanti i viaggi di Anais in questo Diario, deve fuggire da New York, non sta bene, le sue nevrosi ricominciano. Come la capisco, ha bisogno di calore, di colori, suoni, ‘violenza e innocenza, i due aspetti naturali dell’uomo’. La metropoli le ferma il sangue, depaupera il suo mondo interiore, ha bisogno di nuove narrazioni, dell’incanto, della fabulazione. Per sopravvivere, ricomincia l’analisi. Ecco. Ecco cosa mi ha allontanata da questo libro e dagli altri in lettura: i segnali della sofferenza. Però questa è Anais, i suoi viaggi, le persone incontrate, la sua tristezza perché il suo lavoro non è riconosciuto, la sua forza anche nella malattia.
…e la ritrovo: una donna, una scrittrice, un Diario. E la mia domanda è: quanto bisogna essere libere (e come) per scrivere di se stesse in modo totalmente sincero? Libere vuol dire essere, rimanere, sentirsi sole? Anais scrive e descrive del suo ‘cammino’, le città visitate, la morte della madre, l’esperienza con LSD, la consapevolezza di non aver bisogno di sostanze esterne per creare e ricreare mondi con la scrittura, l’Arte come visione e vita.
Belle le considerazioni che fa sull’Artista in genere e trovo attuali le riflessioni sull’America, su psicanalisi e sociologia, Freud e Marx, arrivando al fondo di se stessa per poi risalirne. Anche adesso ho idea che ci sia stata molta Vita e molta della sua intimità che non ha voluto, giustamente, inserire nei Diari, come se dovessi solo immaginarla, leggendo, completando così ciò che so e che sento per Anais. E ora l’ultimo Diario.
Poi in un giorno nero, per tigna riprendo. Per ‘cura’: i libri, si sa, sanno farlo quasi sempre.
Tanti i viaggi di Anais in questo Diario, deve fuggire da New York, non sta bene, le sue nevrosi ricominciano. Come la capisco, ha bisogno di calore, di colori, suoni, ‘violenza e innocenza, i due aspetti naturali dell’uomo’. La metropoli le ferma il sangue, depaupera il suo mondo interiore, ha bisogno di nuove narrazioni, dell’incanto, della fabulazione. Per sopravvivere, ricomincia l’analisi. Ecco. Ecco cosa mi ha allontanata da questo libro e dagli altri in lettura: i segnali della sofferenza. Però questa è Anais, i suoi viaggi, le persone incontrate, la sua tristezza perché il suo lavoro non è riconosciuto, la sua forza anche nella malattia.
…e la ritrovo: una donna, una scrittrice, un Diario. E la mia domanda è: quanto bisogna essere libere (e come) per scrivere di se stesse in modo totalmente sincero? Libere vuol dire essere, rimanere, sentirsi sole? Anais scrive e descrive del suo ‘cammino’, le città visitate, la morte della madre, l’esperienza con LSD, la consapevolezza di non aver bisogno di sostanze esterne per creare e ricreare mondi con la scrittura, l’Arte come visione e vita.
Belle le considerazioni che fa sull’Artista in genere e trovo attuali le riflessioni sull’America, su psicanalisi e sociologia, Freud e Marx, arrivando al fondo di se stessa per poi risalirne. Anche adesso ho idea che ci sia stata molta Vita e molta della sua intimità che non ha voluto, giustamente, inserire nei Diari, come se dovessi solo immaginarla, leggendo, completando così ciò che so e che sento per Anais. E ora l’ultimo Diario.
November 12, 2016
I had to keep in mind that it is a diary so I struggled to find continuity. It's loosely structured chronologically but the ideas vary greatly from paragraph to paragraph. It was also hard to keep track of all the people in her life. Still, there are many descriptions of her life experiences that are so unique they made me smile in awe, and the book is full of quote-worthy commentary. Reading this felt like the surprising experience of talking to someone you wouldn't normally associate with, getting to know who they are, but also finding out that you have more in common than you could have imagined.
August 6, 2024
What a gift it is to peer into Nins mind. This short book took me months to finish, only because I studied every page, savored every word, read and reread paragraphs. I didn’t want it to end. Reading Nins diary sparked so much thought, creativity and life in me. She’s taught me so much about how to live in color, to live passionately and fervently, she has reawakened the artist in me. I don’t agree with all of her opinions on politics and science but nonetheless I loved reading her perspectives and thoughts on it. Her words are addictive, pure life force art.
January 24, 2023
I was chasing a quote of hers I read on FB. Enthralled to see this diary was between trips to California, Mexico and New York. The first 50 pages were interesting and easy to follow. But then it became a babbling, dramatic diary and a reminder that I have other books to read. I never found the quote, but I loved that she concluded her imagination had already given her an LSD trip before she took LSD.
August 8, 2025
3,1 hard to imagine but at the end anaïs (ostensibly) takes lsd and describes the trip in detail and compares it to an orgasm, unsurprisingly. i love how june and henry practically disappear as if anaïs’s obsession is over. the only notable mention of june is that she had been shipped of to a madhouse. of course for me this was not very coherent because i skipped the entirety of volumes II to IV. however it is always nice and very relaxing (sedating) to catch some of her languid writing.
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October 5, 2019Review here: https://corridoiolaterale.wordpress.c...
June 28, 2022
astounding, an experience I will never forget
January 8, 2023
This one's a banger. Anais appears in Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome with Cameron and Curtis Harrington. She also gives a brilliant and chilling analysis of a California brush fire.
There's also ironic consolation in her accounts of rejection by literary magazines and clueless publishers, and later on in the volume meets a sort of pre-Edie Edie Sedgwick named Nina Gitane Primavera, a Fifties tweaker you'll remember long after the book is finished.
The diary ends with Anais dropping acid and not really describing her trip in the vivid ways she criticizes Aldous Huxley as doing. It's an underwhelming segment, and equally annoying are her cliched canonizations of impoverished people on her various vacations.
There's also ironic consolation in her accounts of rejection by literary magazines and clueless publishers, and later on in the volume meets a sort of pre-Edie Edie Sedgwick named Nina Gitane Primavera, a Fifties tweaker you'll remember long after the book is finished.
The diary ends with Anais dropping acid and not really describing her trip in the vivid ways she criticizes Aldous Huxley as doing. It's an underwhelming segment, and equally annoying are her cliched canonizations of impoverished people on her various vacations.
April 9, 2023
This book taught me how to love life.
August 26, 2024
Passei o mês dedicada a estes livros e eu acho que sou uma nova mulher, um fragmento das performances pessoais e poéticas da Anais
August 2, 2025
Perfection. Anaïs Nin, I will devote my life to you
November 27, 2020
The review is taken from my Instagram account: @descanto
When the composer Joaquín Nin abandoned the family, his little daughter Anaïs began to write a diary as her coping mechanism. Her collection of diaries later has become her recollection of the past and a memoir of things she could not say.
The journals of Anaïs Nin tells her real portrayal. Most of them deal with her complicated relationship with Henry Miller; her infatuation with the flirtatious June Miller; her strange liaison with Antonin Artaud. She also tells her sessions with the famous René Allendy and Otto Rank, commenting that psychoanalysis does force one to be more truthful and she realise certain feeling she was not aware of and her childhood traumatic experience; her fear of being hurt, unwanted, unloved.
The journals of Anaïs Nin are a good collection of writings which lead people to know Nin for who she is. Some people praise these collections. I personally enjoy reading the first parts of the volumes. Yet after reading the same old stuffs about Henry, Anaïs, and June...it's getting too monotonous and boring. I also have he feeling that these journals were mostly censored or edited which is a lamentable thing. I expect to know a person in a whole when I read such diaries or journals.
When the composer Joaquín Nin abandoned the family, his little daughter Anaïs began to write a diary as her coping mechanism. Her collection of diaries later has become her recollection of the past and a memoir of things she could not say.
The journals of Anaïs Nin tells her real portrayal. Most of them deal with her complicated relationship with Henry Miller; her infatuation with the flirtatious June Miller; her strange liaison with Antonin Artaud. She also tells her sessions with the famous René Allendy and Otto Rank, commenting that psychoanalysis does force one to be more truthful and she realise certain feeling she was not aware of and her childhood traumatic experience; her fear of being hurt, unwanted, unloved.
The journals of Anaïs Nin are a good collection of writings which lead people to know Nin for who she is. Some people praise these collections. I personally enjoy reading the first parts of the volumes. Yet after reading the same old stuffs about Henry, Anaïs, and June...it's getting too monotonous and boring. I also have he feeling that these journals were mostly censored or edited which is a lamentable thing. I expect to know a person in a whole when I read such diaries or journals.
November 14, 2015
Leerla es un placer en todo el sentido amplio de la palabra. En boca de ella mi querida America y su biodiversidad cobran más color, sabor y vida. Me maravilla su amor por la escritura y su sensiblidada con el arte: la pintura, el teatro la música, etc hacen que en letras de ella cobren un efecto mágia, un efecto sueño.
Revelador saber que ella al leer el diario de Virginia Woolf, no le provocó ninguna emoción ni la empujó al suicidio, en cambio la impulsó a seguir escribiendo sus propios diarios. A mi Virginia me incitó a seguir leyendo y leyendo, y puede que hasta a escribir cuando leí "Cuarto Propio" y "Tres guineas", y ella, Anaïs, me realza como mujer, la más femenina y sensual y sobre todo como individuo artístico, Nunca se sabe para quien escribes ni que efecto puedes crear en quien te lee.
Escribe mujer, no dejes de hacerlo, decía Virginia. Crea arte con el corazón, sé libre, decía Anaïs, Me quedo con ello!
Sigo con los diarios.
Revelador saber que ella al leer el diario de Virginia Woolf, no le provocó ninguna emoción ni la empujó al suicidio, en cambio la impulsó a seguir escribiendo sus propios diarios. A mi Virginia me incitó a seguir leyendo y leyendo, y puede que hasta a escribir cuando leí "Cuarto Propio" y "Tres guineas", y ella, Anaïs, me realza como mujer, la más femenina y sensual y sobre todo como individuo artístico, Nunca se sabe para quien escribes ni que efecto puedes crear en quien te lee.
Escribe mujer, no dejes de hacerlo, decía Virginia. Crea arte con el corazón, sé libre, decía Anaïs, Me quedo con ello!
Sigo con los diarios.
October 18, 2009
I finally finished it. I was really into the book at the beginning and some how lost interest.
May 26, 2013
Her series of six diaries are some of my favorite books of all time.
February 20, 2015
Anais Nin always makes me think ... and that is what EVERY writer should strive for.
December 10, 2025
Loved especially the bits about the masquerades she attended, the artists she met and fell in love with, falling in love myself with the art of Renate Druks and Marjorie Cameron.
February 14, 2011
I love Anaïs Nin, she writes so perfectly what I feel~
July 24, 2014
The opening on Acapulco is beautiful, slow, leisurely. A review "soon."
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews