Delta of Venus / Anais Nin / 1977
I read this book in the dead of night after waking up and not being able to fall asleep. It felt like an appropriate choice for the occasions. In the introduction, Nin describes how Henry James had a patron who paid literati for erotica and a few authors of the period would write for this patron when low on cash. This patron, however, only wanted the mechanical action of sex, the camera up-close on every page, taking all the life and joy and tension out of sex. While I expected a book that read like a strong and spicy old school romance novel, what I actually got was much more enrichening and deep. Nin largely actively counteracts the pornographic reader’s gaze by including short stories with taboo acts, including pedophilia, incest, sexual violence, etc. Nin’s builds tension by portraying the tug and tussle between different characters as they navigate sexuality almost always without much sexual experience or education, a language for consent, or a language for queer gender and sexuality. Some parts of the book are like reading Lolita by Nabokov. Others brought me back to the sexual confusion of my youth, where romance was frequently like trying to participate in a scene where you don’t know what role you play or any of your lines. The stories gave me the language to describe violations and beauty I’ve experienced, sometimes intermixed. I didn’t expect that at all. Nin has made me realize how impoverished much of our erotic scenes in literature are. Even the racism in the book and outdated ideas about gender are fascinating for what they reveal about Nin’s society’s relationship to race and sexuality and how they interact. Only one or so stories included a racist trope that failed to add any literary merit and actively ruined the whole damn short story. I’m glad I read this. 4.5 out of 5