Title: Delta of VenusAuthor: Anaïs Nin
First Published: January 1, 1977
Publisher: Mariner Books
Pages: 306
Genre: Classics, Erotica, Short Stories
Format: Ebook
Source: Purchased
Rating:
From influential feminist artist and essayist Anais Nin, Delta of Venus is one of the most important works of modern female erotica and "a joyous display of the erotic imagination" (The New York Times Book Review).
Anais Nin pens a lush, magical world where the characters of her imagination possess the most universal of desires and exceptional of talents.
Among these provocative stories, a Hungarian adventurer seduces wealthy women then vanishes with their money; a veiled woman selects strangers from a chic restaurant for private trysts; and a Parisian hatmaker named Mathilde leaves her husband for the opium dens of Peru. This is an extraordinarily rich and exotic collection from a master of erotic writing.
I’m going to say right off the bat that this book is definitely not for everyone. Many of the stories feature some very specific kinks that to most will no doubt be gut-wrenching. As a fair warning for those that haven’t read the book, that means things like necrophilia, pedophilia, incest, etc. There are a good number of stories in this collection that are pretty disturbing and violent, many of them made me really uncomfortable reading. I could never recommend this book to the average reader looking for your run of the mill pornography.
I will however say that I understand why this book is hailed as a literary masterpiece and has become a pioneer of feminist fiction. The stories written for this compilation were all commissioned by a private collector that had instructed Nin to exclude romance and poetry in favor of graphic and sexually explicit stories, the latter she definitely delivered in great detail. Despite this, Nin was still able to add her personal touch that gave many of the short stories several layers that went beyond sex and explored themes of love, sensuality, and female eroticism as compared to men. She places a great distinction between male and female sexuality that is presented elegantly even against the most graphic and sordid scenes.
The biggest issue I had with this collection, besides the distressing nature of many of the stories, was the focus on a set of recurring characters over the course of multiple stories. Most of them started out alright at first, but as I got further along I started to dislike all of these characters and had to slog through the second half of the book. I found them to be dreadfully boring and almost put the book down entirely.
I had to give this book some extra points for talented writing alone, it truly is a work of art. However, I can’t say that I really enjoyed the book despite how beautifully it was written. It’s memorable, but it isn’t exactly one that I’d say that I remember fondly. This is a difficult collection to swallow due to the graphic nature of the content but an excellent study of human eroticism.
“I had a feeling that Pandora’s box contained the mysteries of woman’s sensuality, so different from a man’s and for which man’s language was so inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet to be explored.”
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About Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin is a French-born novelist, passionate eroticist, and short story writer, who gained international fame with her journals. Spanning the years from 1931 to 1974, they give an account of one woman’s voyage of self-discovery. “It’s all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.” (from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. I, 1966)
Anaïs Nin was largely ignored until the 1960s. Today she is regarded as one of the leading female writers of the 20th century and a source of inspiration for women challenging conventionally defined gender roles.