Collages (Peter Owen Modern Classic)

Used
Paperback
2002
$10.50

Collages explores a world of fantasy and dreams through an eccentric young painter. A radical work in its time (1964), Anais 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' clientelle. 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.

Synopsis

Collages explores a world of fantasy and dreams through an eccentric young painter. A radical work in its time (1964), Anais 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' clientelle. 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.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 180
Edition: New edition
Publisher: Peter Owen Ltd
Published: 18 Feb 2002
ISBN 10: 0720611458
ISBN 13: 9780720611458

Media Reviews

'A delight.' - The 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.' - TLS; '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 sustained subtle and sustained pleasure.' - The Scotsman

Author Bio

Anais 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 psycho-analysis. 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.