|
Collages explores a world of fantasy and dreams through
an eccentric young painter.
A radical work in its time (1964), Anaïs Nin dispensed
with normal structural convention and allowed her characters
to wander freely in space and time in an attempt to describe
life with the disconnected clarity of a dream in which hip
and freakish lives intersect or merge. Making a rapid escape
from her sick father in Vienna, Renate begins her sensation-seeking
travel odyssey accompanied by a gay Norwegian man who allows
her to open one of his chinese boxes and read a chapter of
his past each time she finds his absence unbearable. They
move from Mexico to California where Renate, when she is not
painting portraits, works as a hostess at a beach nightclub
with a ‘way-out’ clientele. She befriends Nina,
who wants to wash the floor with beer, uses her dress as a
tent and does witch-laughter for radio, and further adventures
ensue.
Perhaps reflecting a developing contemporary awareness of
abstract art, Collages is a series of impressions rather
than a coherent whole, a shifting notebook indelibly inscribed
with Nin’s humour, invention and unrivalled gift for
sensuous description.
‘A delight.’ — Independent
‘Uses words as magnificently colourful, evocative, and
imagist as any plastic combination on canvas but as mysteriously
idiosyncratic as any abstract . . . perfectly told fables,
and prose which is so daringly elaborate, so accurately-timed
that it is not entirely surprising to her compared to Proust.’
— Times Literary Supplement
‘What Nin does is to give an extraordinary revealing
power to the fragments which comprise the book . . . Nin’s
writing is spare, and sharply perceptive, her imaginative
vision quite remarkable. Collages gives subtle and
sustained pleasure.’ — Scotsman
ANAÏS NIN was born in Paris in 1903 and moved to the
USA at the age of eleven. She returned to Paris a decade later
and studied psychoanalysis. Her first book was published in
the 1930s and she went on to write stories and a series of
autobiographical novels (including Collages, A Spy
in the House of Love and Under a Glass Bell) and
her celebrated volumes of erotica, The Delta of Venus
and Little Birds. Perhaps best known for her journals,
which were published by Peter Owen and established her reputation,
her personal life and loves have attracted considerable attention
– partly through her association with Henry Miller and
his wife but also because for a number of years she was married
to two men at the same time, with neither finding out until
after her death in 1977. |
