Review: Delta of Venus, by Anaïs Nin

When I added this book to my list of must-reads I imagined it would be something like D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, a work I greatly enjoyed. But while Lawrence's Chatterley is a striking modernist novel about class systems, gender disparity, and sexuality with many well written and daring erotic scenes, Nin's Delta of Venus is its opposite. This is a book filled with daring erotic scenes, with many well written stories about class, gender disparity, and sexuality thrown in. Delta of Venus is actually a collection of short works written by Nin for a collector of erotica. Her instructions were to eliminate poetic writing in favor of heavily descriptive sex scenes, but Nin melds description and story telling artfully. Her writing, her tendency to delve further and further into the relationships and personal emotions of her characters, reminds me Lawrence's handling of prose, while her characters' sexual abandon reminds me of Martin Amis's more recent novel, The Pregnant Widow, about the feminist and sexual revolution of the 1970s (which also harks heavily back to Lawrence). This book probably isn't for everyone—there is sex on every page—but Nin is credited with giving literature a language for sex and sensuality, and I think for giving women a place in that language as well. She continued what Lawrence started, and what society in general continued a few decades later.

Book 18 on my way to 52