"Collages" by Anaïs Nin

Previously published September 20, 2022 in book reviews, literary, sexuality, social studies, writing

Nin’s dreamscape challenges our own view of reality…

Marguerite Young said she loved this book the most of any written by Anaïs Nin. It was the literary form Nin had said she wanted to achieve in her writing most of all, but not at all what she is famous for. The text rambles much as the work of Young does, and the characters are just as eccentric and fantastic as well. Nin’s dreamscape challenges our own view of reality, and delightfully creates an alternative world many of us might enjoy and prefer than the one we think, or imagine, we live in. Though the work is erotic in the sense of its total aliveness, to my regret there is actually no graphic sex in it at all. But there is a vivid description of an LSD trip that Nin could not have made-up unless having had some prior use and experience in its mind-altering qualities. Even though the gifted Marguerite Young carefully introduced me to this book in one of her fair reviews, it still had many surprises. It is certainly a book I will revisit, if time permits.