Incest. From A Journal of Love. The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin. 1932-1934. With an Introduction by Rupert Pole and Biographical Notes by Gunther Stuhlmann. - Hardcover

Nin, Anais

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0720609054 ISBN 13: 9780720609059

Publisher: Peter Owen, 1993

Synopsis

Few writings explore a woman's love life in such detail, with such subtlety, insight, and pain, as does Anais Nin's original, uncensored diary. It is a life record that deals openly with the physical aspects of relationships and unsparingly with the full spectrum of psychological ramifications. Here was a woman who sought the freedom to act out her sexual and emotional desires with the same guiltless, "amoral" abandon that men have always claimed for themselves. When Nin began publishing sections of her diary in 1966, this aspect of her life was excised, though clearly there was more than could be told at the time concerning her relationships with Henry Miller and his wife, June, with the writer and actor Antonin Artaud, with her analysts Rene Allendy and Otto Rank, and - most important - with her father. Here now is the previously missing portion of Nin's life in the crucial years from 1932 to 1934, the shattering psychological drama that drove her to seek absolution from her psychoanalysts for the ultimate transgression. In its raw exposure of a woman's struggle to come to terms with herself, to find salvation in the very act of writing, Incest unveils an Anais Nin without masks and secrets, yet in the end still mysterious, perhaps inexplicable.

About this title

About the Author

Ana-s Nin (1903-1977) was born in Paris and aspired at an early age to be a writer. An influential artist and thinker, she was the author of several novels, short stories, critical studies, a collection of essays, two volumes of erotica, and nine published volumes of her Diary.

From Publishers Weekly

Picking up where Henry and June (1986) left off, this portion of Nin's diary, which was cut from the expurgated editions published in her lifetime, records her steamy love affair with Henry Miller in Paris, but here her intense adoration gives way to disillusionment. She describes Miller as crude, egotistic, imitative, childishly irresponsible, "a madman." Her real focus, however, is her father, Joaquin Nin, a Spanish pianist and aristocratic Don Juan who seduced her after a 20-year absence. Her graphic account of their lovemaking and of her incestuous romantic feelings is fairly shocking. Nin sought absolution from her psychiatrist and lover, Otto Rank, who advised her to bed her father, then dump him as punishment for abandoning her when she was 10. Nin's ornate, hothouse prose is much rawer than the chiseled style of the expurgated diaries. She seethes with jealousy at Miller's wife June, swoons over poet and actor Antonin Artaud, neglects her protective husband, Hugh Guiler, and describes her traumatic delivery of a stillborn child. Her extraordinary, tangled self-analysis is a disarming record of her emotional and creative growth. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Peter Owen
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0720609054
• ISBN 13: 9780720609059
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352