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| Anaïs
Nin’s Narratives —Jane Eblen Keller Seduction:
A Portrait of Anaïs Nin Literary
Liaisons: Auto/ biographical Appropriations in Modernist Women’s
Fiction |
 Copyright © 2003 by Sky Blue Press |
Read
excerpts from the book reviews published in A
Café in Space.
We would also like to hear from you if you would like to share a new Anaïs Nin related book or publication. We are also interested in new books or publications related to Miller, Durrell & the Villa Seurat Circle. |
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An excerpt from: The New Nin CriticismA Review of Anaïs Nin’s Narratives. Edited by Anne T. Salvatore. University Press of Florida, 2001. 290 pages. ISBN 0-8130-2113-8. —Jane Eblen Keller A new generation of academic readers, well represented in this collection of essays, is weighing in, and we should welcome them. The contributors to this book have at least two constructive and calming traits in common: they are taking Nin seriously and their point of departure is objective scholarship, not defensive or accusatory personal reaction. As Anne Salvatore, a professor at Rider University, puts it in her introduction, these writers believe Nin’s narratives are worthy of “exacting scholarly study.” And that is precisely what we get. If these writers tilt in favor of Nin, most take great pains to be rational and expository in their favoritism . . . |
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An excerpt from: The Biographical Allure A Review of Seduction: A Portrait of Anaïs Nin, Margot Duxler. EdgeWork Books, 2002. 240 pages. ISBN 1-931223-02-5. —Thomas March Every biography is a story of seduction, and as such proceeds as much from the seduced as from the seducer. Of course, most biographers seek to minimize if not totally obliterate the traces of their personal fascination with their subjects. In Seduction: A Portrait of Anaïs Nin, Margot Beth Duxler honestly addresses the consequences of her friendship with Nin, and her own motivations for succumbing to the allure of Nin’s invented selves. In fact, Duxler’s personal friendship with Nin makes her uniquely qualified to write the kind of biography she has set out to provide here. She begins to forge a compelling integration of the academic and the experiential, as she examines how her own seduction by the myth of Anaïs Nin as a liberated woman has been tempered by a disillusion that emerged after Nin’s death with the revelation of her multiple lives and lies. The result has not been resentment on Duxler’s part but an increased desire to understand the woman by whose persona(e) she has, by her own admission, been guided and inspired. The seductive quality of Nin’s inventions is replaced, in Duxler’s experience, by the equally seductive promise of understanding why Nin felt the need to deceive. Duxler looks primarily to Nin’s Diary in order to uncover the motivations for Nin’s creation of multiple, fully realized, and seemingly contradictory selves. The urge to understand others, to recognize and validate the importance of individual experience, is a defining feature of Nin’s novels and other fiction. Duxler has demonstrated her sincere and strong desire to understand, as well as her competence in wielding the critical tools with which to articulate a unique appreciation of the Diary as a narrative of discovery, compensation, compulsion, and creativity. Duxler’s book is at times a biography, a critical assessment of Nin’s Diary, a primer on the psychological functions of diary writing, as well as a personal memoir of her own relationship with the various myths of Anaïs Nin. On one hand, this structure mirrors the elusive nature of Nin’s identity, indeed of any biographical subject, whose self-representations and contested and disparate receptions by others constantly force a biographer to reevaluate and amend the portrait in progress. Then again, this results in a highly fragmented text, one that identifies the importance of several approaches to understanding Nin’s development while only gesturing toward the implications of their full integration. |
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An excerpt from: An Argument for Further Study A glance at the Nin-Miller chapter in Literary Liaisons: Auto/ biographical Appropriations in Modernist Women’s Fiction, by Lynette Felber, Northern Illinois University Press, 2002. 232 pages. ISBN 0-87580-301-6. —Paul Herron Using a theoretical framework—feminist, Lacanian, Kristevan, and genre-based—Lynette Felber’s new book, Literary Liaisons, examines what is termed “appropriation” from literary/romantic relationships by modernist women writers—in other words, claiming literary ownership of the relationship within their fiction. Felber uses a consistent and well thought out approach to examine relationships involving Anaïs Nin, Rebecca West, Zelda Fitzgerald, Radclyffe Hall, and H.D., revealing a common struggle for feminine identity and subjectivity. While all the cases are interesting and enlightening, of primary interest here is the study of the relationship between Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller in the chapter entitled “Anaïs Nin’s Appropriations.” Refreshingly, Felber views Nin as a “woman autobiographer who gestures toward a postmodern view of the self” rather than a mere “liar,” as some of her biographers have charged, although she balances her statement by saying the accusation is partially due to Nin’s refusal to “distinguish between her true autobiographical story and the fictional lives she creates.” She prefers to look upon Nin’s heavily edited Diary Volume 1 as autobiographical fiction, and the narrator as a textual persona . . . |
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