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Winter of Artifice & House of Incest
The stories in Winter of Artifice are studies of the father-daughter relationship, explorations of self-discovery , while legendary House of Incest is described by the author as "the seed of all my work, the poem from which my novels were born". All four pieces are closely related to the now-famous Journals.
- GenresFiction
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
About the author
Anaïs Nin
352 books9,211 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 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 19, 2018
Everything from the diaries lives within these pages but in a beautifully distilled way.
January 2, 2023
lol she’s so cray…… so good tho
April 26, 2026
Compilation of Anaïs Nin's first short story collection "Winter of Artifice" and the prose poem "House of Incest", her first professionally published work of fiction.
The first story in "Winter of Artifice" is titled "Stella" and follows a film actress who experiences a vast disconnect between her carefully constructed public image and her much more complex inner emotional life, as well as a disconnect between her actual desires and her husband's view of their marriage which eventually pushes her to infidelity. In many ways this prefigures her later novel "A Spy in the House of Love".
Meanwhile, the titular short story follows a girl growing through adolescence and explores her increasingly dysfunctional relationship with her father, as well as their attempts to repair it which prove more difficult than either predicted. If you've read Anaïs Nin's diaries you can recognise the emotional core of the story as clearly inspired by her own tense relation to her father, and reactions to same. However, the details are different enough that the story cannot be categorised as just a veiled autobiography, and it's way more interesting than if Nin had stuck closely to that.
The third and final story in "Winter of Artifice" is titled "The Voice" and has to be my personal favourite. This story explores lesbian romance in a surprisingly explicit way for mainstream fiction from the 1930's, and is also one of the trippiest and most mystical works I've read by Nin so far, since it includes several very strange mystical episodes written in an exceptionally imaginative way. I would argue that it qualifies as an example of non-standard occult fiction along with M. John Harrison's "The Course of the Heart" and Damian Murphy's "Saint Severina's Fire". This is one reason I would recommend "Winter of Artifice" to people frustrated with contemporary occult fiction authors' reluctance to think outside the "Weird Tales"-style cosmic horror box, as "The Voice" could not be further away from that sensibility.
As far as "House of Incest" goes? I would describe it as a more surrealistic and hallucinatory version of Anaïs Nin's later novel "A Spy in the House of Love", which follows a woman named Sabina who embarks on several extramarital affairs with men from different social classes and cultural backgrounds in order to escape the social demands placed upon women. Many of the same characters (e. g. Sabina herself) appear, and the story revolves around some of the same themes; however, instead of a realistic narrative it takes place entirely at the level of nonfigurative dream logic, with Sabina floating through astral dimensions and inhabiting weird fantastic civilisations elsewhere in the cosmos. The narrative eventually culminates in Sabina exploring the titular house, an old palace where every new room has a new symbolic meaning. Come to think of it, the best comparison might be the Kabbalistically flavoured quest narratives that Leonora Carrington used in some of her short stories.
More than anything else, both "Winter of Artifice" and "House of Incest" are simply joys to read for how beautifully written the prose is and how elegantly Anaïs Nin describes and explores her characters' inner emotional lives, and I have come across very few authors whom I would place on the same level as her.
The first story in "Winter of Artifice" is titled "Stella" and follows a film actress who experiences a vast disconnect between her carefully constructed public image and her much more complex inner emotional life, as well as a disconnect between her actual desires and her husband's view of their marriage which eventually pushes her to infidelity. In many ways this prefigures her later novel "A Spy in the House of Love".
Meanwhile, the titular short story follows a girl growing through adolescence and explores her increasingly dysfunctional relationship with her father, as well as their attempts to repair it which prove more difficult than either predicted. If you've read Anaïs Nin's diaries you can recognise the emotional core of the story as clearly inspired by her own tense relation to her father, and reactions to same. However, the details are different enough that the story cannot be categorised as just a veiled autobiography, and it's way more interesting than if Nin had stuck closely to that.
The third and final story in "Winter of Artifice" is titled "The Voice" and has to be my personal favourite. This story explores lesbian romance in a surprisingly explicit way for mainstream fiction from the 1930's, and is also one of the trippiest and most mystical works I've read by Nin so far, since it includes several very strange mystical episodes written in an exceptionally imaginative way. I would argue that it qualifies as an example of non-standard occult fiction along with M. John Harrison's "The Course of the Heart" and Damian Murphy's "Saint Severina's Fire". This is one reason I would recommend "Winter of Artifice" to people frustrated with contemporary occult fiction authors' reluctance to think outside the "Weird Tales"-style cosmic horror box, as "The Voice" could not be further away from that sensibility.
As far as "House of Incest" goes? I would describe it as a more surrealistic and hallucinatory version of Anaïs Nin's later novel "A Spy in the House of Love", which follows a woman named Sabina who embarks on several extramarital affairs with men from different social classes and cultural backgrounds in order to escape the social demands placed upon women. Many of the same characters (e. g. Sabina herself) appear, and the story revolves around some of the same themes; however, instead of a realistic narrative it takes place entirely at the level of nonfigurative dream logic, with Sabina floating through astral dimensions and inhabiting weird fantastic civilisations elsewhere in the cosmos. The narrative eventually culminates in Sabina exploring the titular house, an old palace where every new room has a new symbolic meaning. Come to think of it, the best comparison might be the Kabbalistically flavoured quest narratives that Leonora Carrington used in some of her short stories.
More than anything else, both "Winter of Artifice" and "House of Incest" are simply joys to read for how beautifully written the prose is and how elegantly Anaïs Nin describes and explores her characters' inner emotional lives, and I have come across very few authors whom I would place on the same level as her.
March 12, 2023
Winter of Artifice
“A little Girl, full of innocence and indulgence. And then this madness…”
The cold and hard story about the desire to be loved. This kind of addiction has no winners, everybody is left out in the Dark.
“And she thinking: I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.”
“In general women consider men as enemies, and they are glad when they can humiliate or demolish them.”
I feel the dispair
“He became slowly aware of her, of her being loved by other men. She became more vivid in him through his hatred of her.”
House of Incest
“I am constantly reconstructing a pattern of something forever lost and which I cannot forget.”
This is the story of my lost love forever in my mind.
“The egg so white, so still, gave birth to hope without breaking….”
The story makes me sad knowing the feelings she desribes
“A little Girl, full of innocence and indulgence. And then this madness…”
The cold and hard story about the desire to be loved. This kind of addiction has no winners, everybody is left out in the Dark.
“And she thinking: I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.”
“In general women consider men as enemies, and they are glad when they can humiliate or demolish them.”
I feel the dispair
“He became slowly aware of her, of her being loved by other men. She became more vivid in him through his hatred of her.”
House of Incest
“I am constantly reconstructing a pattern of something forever lost and which I cannot forget.”
This is the story of my lost love forever in my mind.
“The egg so white, so still, gave birth to hope without breaking….”
The story makes me sad knowing the feelings she desribes
November 4, 2014
Splendid!
Read
March 8, 2023‘House of Incest’ was a trippy journey bound all up in images. The best fiction I’ve read by her. ‘Winter of Artifice’ was a poor composite of characters who were written much better in the expurgated diaries. I could not even finish it, because I had read it all before there – it fell so flat. ‘Stella’ was the same but it was shorter.
Quotes
I smile because I listen to the OTHER and I believe the OTHER. I am a marionette pulled by unskilled fingers, pulled apart, inharmoniously dislocated; one arm dead, the other rhapsodizing in mid-air. I laugh, not when it fits into my talk, but when it fits into the undercurrents of my talk. I want to know what is running underneath thus punctuated by bitter upheavals. The two currents do not meet. I see two women in me freakishly bound together, like circus twins. I see them tearing away from each other. I can hear the tearing, the anger and love, passion and pity. When the act of dislocation suddenly ceases - or when I cease to be aware of the sound - then the silence is more terrible because there is nothing but insanity around me, the insanity of things pulling, pulling within oneself, the roots tearing at each other to grow separately, the strain made to achieve unity. It requires only a bar of music to still the dislocation for a moment; but there comes the smile again, and I know that the two of us have leaped beyond cohesion. Greyness is no ordinary greyness, but a vast lead roof which covers the world like the lid of a soup pan. The breath of human beings is like the steam of a laundry house. The smoke of cigarettes is like a rain of ashes from Vesuvius. The lights taste of sulphur, and each face stares at you with the immensity of its defects. The smallness of a room is like that of an iron cage in which one can neither sit nor lie down. The largeness of other rooms is like a mortal danger always suspended above you, awaiting the moment of your joy to fall. Laughter and tears are not separate experiences, with intervals of rest : they rush out together and it is like walking with a sword between your legs. Rain does not wet your hair but drips in the cells of the brain with the obstinacy of a leak. Snow does not freeze the hands, but like ether distends the lungs until they burst.
I am an insane woman for whom houses wink and open their bellies. Significance stares at me from everywhere, like a gigantic underlying ghostliness. Significance emerges out of dank alleys and sombre faces, leans out of the windows of strange houses. I am constantly reconstructing a pattern of something forever lost …
The house had the shape of an egg, and it was carpeted with cotton and windowless; one slept in the down and heard through the shell the street organ and the apple vendor who could not find the bell.
Images – bringing a dissolution of the soul within the body like the rupture of sweet-acid of the orgasm. Images made the blood run back and forth, and the watchfulness of the mind watching against dangerous ecstasies was now useless. Reality was drowned and fantasies choked each hour of the day.
Nothing seems true today except the death of the goldfish who used to make love at ninety kilometres an hour in the pool. The maid has given him a Christian burial. To the worms! To the worms!
Quotes
I smile because I listen to the OTHER and I believe the OTHER. I am a marionette pulled by unskilled fingers, pulled apart, inharmoniously dislocated; one arm dead, the other rhapsodizing in mid-air. I laugh, not when it fits into my talk, but when it fits into the undercurrents of my talk. I want to know what is running underneath thus punctuated by bitter upheavals. The two currents do not meet. I see two women in me freakishly bound together, like circus twins. I see them tearing away from each other. I can hear the tearing, the anger and love, passion and pity. When the act of dislocation suddenly ceases - or when I cease to be aware of the sound - then the silence is more terrible because there is nothing but insanity around me, the insanity of things pulling, pulling within oneself, the roots tearing at each other to grow separately, the strain made to achieve unity. It requires only a bar of music to still the dislocation for a moment; but there comes the smile again, and I know that the two of us have leaped beyond cohesion. Greyness is no ordinary greyness, but a vast lead roof which covers the world like the lid of a soup pan. The breath of human beings is like the steam of a laundry house. The smoke of cigarettes is like a rain of ashes from Vesuvius. The lights taste of sulphur, and each face stares at you with the immensity of its defects. The smallness of a room is like that of an iron cage in which one can neither sit nor lie down. The largeness of other rooms is like a mortal danger always suspended above you, awaiting the moment of your joy to fall. Laughter and tears are not separate experiences, with intervals of rest : they rush out together and it is like walking with a sword between your legs. Rain does not wet your hair but drips in the cells of the brain with the obstinacy of a leak. Snow does not freeze the hands, but like ether distends the lungs until they burst.
I am an insane woman for whom houses wink and open their bellies. Significance stares at me from everywhere, like a gigantic underlying ghostliness. Significance emerges out of dank alleys and sombre faces, leans out of the windows of strange houses. I am constantly reconstructing a pattern of something forever lost …
The house had the shape of an egg, and it was carpeted with cotton and windowless; one slept in the down and heard through the shell the street organ and the apple vendor who could not find the bell.
Images – bringing a dissolution of the soul within the body like the rupture of sweet-acid of the orgasm. Images made the blood run back and forth, and the watchfulness of the mind watching against dangerous ecstasies was now useless. Reality was drowned and fantasies choked each hour of the day.
Nothing seems true today except the death of the goldfish who used to make love at ninety kilometres an hour in the pool. The maid has given him a Christian burial. To the worms! To the worms!
June 25, 2022
Un libro un tanto abstracto que te enreda entre la poesía de sus página, me encandilo.
May 12, 2024
La lectura es compleja, abstracta, onírica, pero envuelve y deleita. Me quedo con la idea de que cuando vemos al ser amado, empezamos a tener un cuerpo, como si volviéramos a nacer.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews