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Anaïs Nin Reader
Fictional Novel, Literary Fiction, Literary Studies
Paperback
First published September 1, 1973
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 21, 2021
My girliest, bubbliest friendship was with a fellow cheerleader in high school, a ballerina named Tiffany. We loved shopping and glitter and skipping school to drink espresso con panna, extra-hot, but our favorite hobby was, as we called it, "analyzing people." We'd choose a mutual friend and proceed to pick apart his personality, trying to decode his secret fears and desires. We'd read his past and future on the ceiling as we lay on the shag carpet of her parents' living room, twisting our ankles in the air and eating candy hearts.
I suppose teenage boys don't do this. Boys are busy fixing cars and getting A's in math or something. Girls gossip, and smart girls psychoanalyze. Perhaps that's why, according to the Psychology Today quote on the cover, Nin "can communicate what it's like inside a woman's head, the uniqueness of being a woman." That idea pops up throughout criticism of Nin - her writing is, they say, uniquely feminine. In her writing, as in Tiffany's and my winding speculations, superficial facts have no inherent worth; only the psyche matters. Nin doesn't mention which brand of detergent her characters use or where they went to school, with sly winks about how that translates into such-and-such social class or this-and-that historical import. Each detail has to earn its keep by working as a window into a character's innermost currents. Even the stories, the actions and inaction, have meaning only insofar as they illuminate the psyche. To read through the excerpts in this reader is to swim and be poured through a gallery of inverted portraits.
The inside and the outside trembling and losing the line between them. Is that feminine? We who carry people in our bellies and food in our breasts, perhaps we are primed to touch the plaster statue not as an artifact but as a psychedelic symbol, to lick the marble columns and dress ourselves in Alpen ice. Or maybe the critics are just lazy and sexist.
Nin's brilliance doesn't leak out of her vagina. Nin is spectacular because she is a damn good writer. She crafts a careful, subtle guide to the poetry of dreams that lies inside and around our daytime prose. Check out this reader and let it guide you to her other works - don't believe the hype about Nin in either direction, the fawning or the snobs, let her words speak for themselves! The world around you will start speaking too, in a foreign tongue that's strangely familiar, more familiar even than your mother tongue, and you find yourself straining to reply, to say... Yes, it's like a dream. Don't wake up.
I suppose teenage boys don't do this. Boys are busy fixing cars and getting A's in math or something. Girls gossip, and smart girls psychoanalyze. Perhaps that's why, according to the Psychology Today quote on the cover, Nin "can communicate what it's like inside a woman's head, the uniqueness of being a woman." That idea pops up throughout criticism of Nin - her writing is, they say, uniquely feminine. In her writing, as in Tiffany's and my winding speculations, superficial facts have no inherent worth; only the psyche matters. Nin doesn't mention which brand of detergent her characters use or where they went to school, with sly winks about how that translates into such-and-such social class or this-and-that historical import. Each detail has to earn its keep by working as a window into a character's innermost currents. Even the stories, the actions and inaction, have meaning only insofar as they illuminate the psyche. To read through the excerpts in this reader is to swim and be poured through a gallery of inverted portraits.
The inside and the outside trembling and losing the line between them. Is that feminine? We who carry people in our bellies and food in our breasts, perhaps we are primed to touch the plaster statue not as an artifact but as a psychedelic symbol, to lick the marble columns and dress ourselves in Alpen ice. Or maybe the critics are just lazy and sexist.
Nin's brilliance doesn't leak out of her vagina. Nin is spectacular because she is a damn good writer. She crafts a careful, subtle guide to the poetry of dreams that lies inside and around our daytime prose. Check out this reader and let it guide you to her other works - don't believe the hype about Nin in either direction, the fawning or the snobs, let her words speak for themselves! The world around you will start speaking too, in a foreign tongue that's strangely familiar, more familiar even than your mother tongue, and you find yourself straining to reply, to say... Yes, it's like a dream. Don't wake up.
July 20, 2015
I looked with chameleon eyes upon the changing face of the world, looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self. (p.45)
Deep into the other we turned our harlot eyes. (p.47)
She was spreading herself like the night over the universe and found no god to lie with. (p.48)
Your lies are not lies, Sabina. They are arrows flung out of your orbit by the strength of your fantasy. To nourish illusion. To destroy reality. (p.49)
I wanted to embrace and hold the light, the wind, the sun, the night, the whole world. I wanted to caress, to heal, to rock, to lull, to surround, to encompass. And I strained and I held so much that they broke; they broke away from me. Everything eluded me then. I was condemned not to hold. (p.56)
She did not know it then, as indeed most of us never know when it is we experience the full measure of joy or sorrow. But our feelings penetrate us like a poison of undetectable nature. We have sorrows of which we do not know the origin or name. (p.65)
She wanted to enjoy. Her life had been a long strain, one long effort to surpass herself, to create, to perfect, a desperate and anxious flight upwards, always aiming higher, seeking greater difficulties, accumulating victories, loves, books, creations, always shedding yesterday’s woman to pursue a new vision. (p.70)
She was a woman, she had to live in a world built by the man she loved, live by his system. In the world she made alone she was lonely. (p.72)
People were made of crystal for her. She could see right through their flesh, through and beyond the structure of their bones. Her eyes stripped them of their defects, their awkwardness, their stuttering. She overlooked the big ears, the frame too small, the hunched back, the wet hands, the webbed-foot walk … she forgave … she became clairvoyant. (p.90)
His body alone was there, but his soul was absent: it always escaped through a hundred fissures, it was in flight always, towards the past, or towards tomorrow, anywhere but in the present. (p.91)
His talk was empty, marginal, His whole ingenuity was spent circling away from everything vital, in remaining on the surface by adroit descriptions of nothing; by a swift chain of puerilities, by long speeches about trivialities, by lengthy expansion of empty facts. (p.93)
His house was a storehouse of supplies which revealed his way of living too far ahead of himself, a fight against the improvised, the unexpected. He had prepared a fortress against need, war and change. (p.104)
This enthusiasm which must be held in check was a great burden for a child’s soul. She had never been able to curb a joy or sorrow: to restrain meant to kill, to bury. (p.105)
When one is pretending the entire body revolts. (p.111)
At the bottom of the stairs lay the wrecked mariners of the street current, the tramps who had fallen out of the crowd life, who refused to obey. Like me, at some point of the trajectory, they had fallen out, and here they lay shipwrecked at the foot of the trees, sleeping, drinking. They had abandoned time, possessions, labor, slavery. They walked and slept in counter-rhythm to the world. (p.113)
When I lie down to dream it is to plant the seed for the miracle and the fulfillment. (p.116)
The candles never conquered the darkness but maintained a disquieting duel with the night. (p.117)
The ragpicker worked in silence and never looked at anything that was whole. His eyes sought the broken, the worn, the faded, the fragmented ...Fragments, incompleted worlds, rags, detritus, the end of objects, and the beginning of transmutations. (p.127)
I pushed with anger, with despair, with frenzy, with the feeling that I would die pushing, as one exhales the last breath, that I would push everything out inside of me, and my soul with all the blood around it, and the sinews with my heart inside of them, choked, and that my body itself would open and smoke would rise, and I would feel the ultimate incision of death. (p.131)
He had established his domination in this. At every turn nature must be subjugated. Very soon, with his coldness, he represses her violence. Very soon, he polishes her language, her manners, her impulses. He reduces and limits her hospitality, her friendliness, her desire for expansion. (p.139)
She has never known anything but oppression. She has never been out of a small universe delimited by man. Yet something is expanding in her. (p.140)
A part of her wants to expand. A part of her being wants to stay with Molnar. This conflict tears her asunder. This pulling and tearing brings on illness. (p.141)
Lying in the fevered sheets of insomnia, there was a human being cheated by the dream. (p.160)
He came not to plunder, to possess, to overpower. With great gentleness he moved towards the hospitable regions of her being, towards the peaceful fields of her interior landscape, where white flowers placed themselves against green backgrounds as in Botticelli paintings of spring. (p.162)
He would lie down and nothing more would be demanded of the dreamer, no longer expected to participate, to speak, to act, to decide. (p.174)
I want to stay in this room forever, not with man the father but with man the son, carving, painting, dancing, dreaming, and always beginning, born anew every day, never aging, full of faith and impulse, turning and changing to every wind like mobiles. I do not love those who have ceased to flow, to believe, to feel. Those who can no longer melt, exult, who cannot let themselves be cheated, laugh at loss, those who are bound and frozen. (p.179)
In the world there was a conspiracy against improvisation. It was only permitted in jazz. (p.208)
Is that the secret, then? It’s those who don’t succeed in going native, in belonging, who get desperately lonely and self-destructive? (p.213)
The brain of man is filled with passageways like the contours and multiple crossroads of the labyrinth. In its curved folds lie the imprint of thousands of images, recordings and millions of words. (p.237)
He talked without premeditation. He seemed the incarnation of spontaneity. Such a contrast to herself was a source of fascination at first. He seemed direct, open, naked. He never withheld what he thought or felt. He passed no judgement on others, and expected none to be passed on him. (p.239)
She is suspicious of words. She lives by her senses. We do not have a language for the senses. Feelings are images. (p.249)
As soon as her mother died her rebellions collapsed. She became ‘possessed’ by the spirit of her mother. It was her only way of maintaining her alive within herself. How wise the primitives were who retained their ritual so they would know when this possession took place, and also how to exorcise it. (p.250)
He felt entombed by the stillness of objects, the unchanging landscapes in frames. (p.263)
The fire chief stood by, preoccupied, wondering at which moment the suicide of the machine would become an attempt to overthrow the government. (p.284)
…the feelings of the body, from its most extreme impulses to its smallest gesture, are the warm root for true vision, and from that warm root can we truly grow. (p.290)
…he suffers, he suffers much from pity, tenderness, horror- he participates with feeling. What drives him to despair is his very conviction of the sacredness of the body- and war is a monstrous holocaust of innumerable bodies. (p.300)
And as no one would go along with him, he went alone, through hell. And the more experiences he went through, the more he understood. The more you know about hell, the more you know about heaven. (p.304)
The diary made me aware of organic and perpetual motion, perpetual change in character. When you write a novel or a short story, you are arresting motion for a period of that story, a span of time. (p.334)
The danger of photographic realism is that it discounts all possibilities of change, of transformations, and therefore does not show the way out of situations which trap human beings. (p.339)
Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold. Poetry, which is our relation to the senses, enables us to retain a living relationship to all things. (p.339)
Deep into the other we turned our harlot eyes. (p.47)
She was spreading herself like the night over the universe and found no god to lie with. (p.48)
Your lies are not lies, Sabina. They are arrows flung out of your orbit by the strength of your fantasy. To nourish illusion. To destroy reality. (p.49)
I wanted to embrace and hold the light, the wind, the sun, the night, the whole world. I wanted to caress, to heal, to rock, to lull, to surround, to encompass. And I strained and I held so much that they broke; they broke away from me. Everything eluded me then. I was condemned not to hold. (p.56)
She did not know it then, as indeed most of us never know when it is we experience the full measure of joy or sorrow. But our feelings penetrate us like a poison of undetectable nature. We have sorrows of which we do not know the origin or name. (p.65)
She wanted to enjoy. Her life had been a long strain, one long effort to surpass herself, to create, to perfect, a desperate and anxious flight upwards, always aiming higher, seeking greater difficulties, accumulating victories, loves, books, creations, always shedding yesterday’s woman to pursue a new vision. (p.70)
She was a woman, she had to live in a world built by the man she loved, live by his system. In the world she made alone she was lonely. (p.72)
People were made of crystal for her. She could see right through their flesh, through and beyond the structure of their bones. Her eyes stripped them of their defects, their awkwardness, their stuttering. She overlooked the big ears, the frame too small, the hunched back, the wet hands, the webbed-foot walk … she forgave … she became clairvoyant. (p.90)
His body alone was there, but his soul was absent: it always escaped through a hundred fissures, it was in flight always, towards the past, or towards tomorrow, anywhere but in the present. (p.91)
His talk was empty, marginal, His whole ingenuity was spent circling away from everything vital, in remaining on the surface by adroit descriptions of nothing; by a swift chain of puerilities, by long speeches about trivialities, by lengthy expansion of empty facts. (p.93)
His house was a storehouse of supplies which revealed his way of living too far ahead of himself, a fight against the improvised, the unexpected. He had prepared a fortress against need, war and change. (p.104)
This enthusiasm which must be held in check was a great burden for a child’s soul. She had never been able to curb a joy or sorrow: to restrain meant to kill, to bury. (p.105)
When one is pretending the entire body revolts. (p.111)
At the bottom of the stairs lay the wrecked mariners of the street current, the tramps who had fallen out of the crowd life, who refused to obey. Like me, at some point of the trajectory, they had fallen out, and here they lay shipwrecked at the foot of the trees, sleeping, drinking. They had abandoned time, possessions, labor, slavery. They walked and slept in counter-rhythm to the world. (p.113)
When I lie down to dream it is to plant the seed for the miracle and the fulfillment. (p.116)
The candles never conquered the darkness but maintained a disquieting duel with the night. (p.117)
The ragpicker worked in silence and never looked at anything that was whole. His eyes sought the broken, the worn, the faded, the fragmented ...Fragments, incompleted worlds, rags, detritus, the end of objects, and the beginning of transmutations. (p.127)
I pushed with anger, with despair, with frenzy, with the feeling that I would die pushing, as one exhales the last breath, that I would push everything out inside of me, and my soul with all the blood around it, and the sinews with my heart inside of them, choked, and that my body itself would open and smoke would rise, and I would feel the ultimate incision of death. (p.131)
He had established his domination in this. At every turn nature must be subjugated. Very soon, with his coldness, he represses her violence. Very soon, he polishes her language, her manners, her impulses. He reduces and limits her hospitality, her friendliness, her desire for expansion. (p.139)
She has never known anything but oppression. She has never been out of a small universe delimited by man. Yet something is expanding in her. (p.140)
A part of her wants to expand. A part of her being wants to stay with Molnar. This conflict tears her asunder. This pulling and tearing brings on illness. (p.141)
Lying in the fevered sheets of insomnia, there was a human being cheated by the dream. (p.160)
He came not to plunder, to possess, to overpower. With great gentleness he moved towards the hospitable regions of her being, towards the peaceful fields of her interior landscape, where white flowers placed themselves against green backgrounds as in Botticelli paintings of spring. (p.162)
He would lie down and nothing more would be demanded of the dreamer, no longer expected to participate, to speak, to act, to decide. (p.174)
I want to stay in this room forever, not with man the father but with man the son, carving, painting, dancing, dreaming, and always beginning, born anew every day, never aging, full of faith and impulse, turning and changing to every wind like mobiles. I do not love those who have ceased to flow, to believe, to feel. Those who can no longer melt, exult, who cannot let themselves be cheated, laugh at loss, those who are bound and frozen. (p.179)
In the world there was a conspiracy against improvisation. It was only permitted in jazz. (p.208)
Is that the secret, then? It’s those who don’t succeed in going native, in belonging, who get desperately lonely and self-destructive? (p.213)
The brain of man is filled with passageways like the contours and multiple crossroads of the labyrinth. In its curved folds lie the imprint of thousands of images, recordings and millions of words. (p.237)
He talked without premeditation. He seemed the incarnation of spontaneity. Such a contrast to herself was a source of fascination at first. He seemed direct, open, naked. He never withheld what he thought or felt. He passed no judgement on others, and expected none to be passed on him. (p.239)
She is suspicious of words. She lives by her senses. We do not have a language for the senses. Feelings are images. (p.249)
As soon as her mother died her rebellions collapsed. She became ‘possessed’ by the spirit of her mother. It was her only way of maintaining her alive within herself. How wise the primitives were who retained their ritual so they would know when this possession took place, and also how to exorcise it. (p.250)
He felt entombed by the stillness of objects, the unchanging landscapes in frames. (p.263)
The fire chief stood by, preoccupied, wondering at which moment the suicide of the machine would become an attempt to overthrow the government. (p.284)
…the feelings of the body, from its most extreme impulses to its smallest gesture, are the warm root for true vision, and from that warm root can we truly grow. (p.290)
…he suffers, he suffers much from pity, tenderness, horror- he participates with feeling. What drives him to despair is his very conviction of the sacredness of the body- and war is a monstrous holocaust of innumerable bodies. (p.300)
And as no one would go along with him, he went alone, through hell. And the more experiences he went through, the more he understood. The more you know about hell, the more you know about heaven. (p.304)
The diary made me aware of organic and perpetual motion, perpetual change in character. When you write a novel or a short story, you are arresting motion for a period of that story, a span of time. (p.334)
The danger of photographic realism is that it discounts all possibilities of change, of transformations, and therefore does not show the way out of situations which trap human beings. (p.339)
Poetry is the alchemy which teaches us to convert ordinary materials into gold. Poetry, which is our relation to the senses, enables us to retain a living relationship to all things. (p.339)
July 20, 2009
this chick was HOT!!!
December 15, 2022
sometimes you’re like “wow i can’t believe this stuff came out of somebody’s brain” and then other times you’re like “wow i can’t believe this stuff came out of somebody’s brain… and i wish it hadn’t”
June 21, 2024
Selections are too sporadic and varying in tone and skill
January 21, 2018
The only reason I gave this book a 4 is because I was reminded halfway through that “readers” are such a tease! However, it was a nice rekindling with one of my favorites, including a few pieces I hadn’t yet read.
March 19, 2016
This is a very odd little anthology published back in the 1970s. It cuts in and out of various works. It did give me a very good idea of which books of Nin's I would enjoy reading, and which books I should avoid.
This was the first time I've read Nin in length, despite reading all around her, as it were. I found her nonfiction essays to be tedious, unoriginal, antiquated and unreadable, lacking the stuff that makes her fiction, diary and prose poetry so great, namely her immense skill in writing sensually evocative yet extremely precise prose. There are very few writers I've read who can paint such a vividly full picture with an economy of verbiage.
For lack of a better word, her mentality is very female. Some writers have a way of writing that demonstrates their sex, and she's very clear and honest about the sort of way of viewing the world and processing emotions a woman has. That sort of way of perceiving the world, combined with the skill in imagery, leads to a style that lends itself best to emotional impressionism and veiled symbolism.
The problem is that Nin seems to want to be an intellectual as much as an artist, and she's nowhere near as good a thinker as she is a creative force. She's best when she just lets the unconscious take over rather than trying to drag it out and prob it with some half-baked psychoanalysis.
2.5 out of 5 stars.
This was the first time I've read Nin in length, despite reading all around her, as it were. I found her nonfiction essays to be tedious, unoriginal, antiquated and unreadable, lacking the stuff that makes her fiction, diary and prose poetry so great, namely her immense skill in writing sensually evocative yet extremely precise prose. There are very few writers I've read who can paint such a vividly full picture with an economy of verbiage.
For lack of a better word, her mentality is very female. Some writers have a way of writing that demonstrates their sex, and she's very clear and honest about the sort of way of viewing the world and processing emotions a woman has. That sort of way of perceiving the world, combined with the skill in imagery, leads to a style that lends itself best to emotional impressionism and veiled symbolism.
The problem is that Nin seems to want to be an intellectual as much as an artist, and she's nowhere near as good a thinker as she is a creative force. She's best when she just lets the unconscious take over rather than trying to drag it out and prob it with some half-baked psychoanalysis.
2.5 out of 5 stars.
September 28, 2014
My one star rating is not due to Nin's prose or subject matter, it is related to the way they assembled this anthology. It is scattered, random, oddly selected, jumbled up with no understandable connections, and altogether confusing. At the end there are the critiques she wrote about writers and other artists so if you don't know the work it is absolutely pointless.
June 18, 2011
This is a really terrible anthology, but it did make me want to run out and read her diaries.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews