Delta of Venus (1977)

Yep, this is happening.

So Anais Nin wrote this stuff at a dollar a page for an unknown collector who kept telling her to write less literary crap, more of the in and out. Which infuriated her, because she thought he was destroying everything interesting about sex. Which is basically the same debate people are having today about internet porn.

And she keeps punishing him for it. In one story a woman has an erotic opium experience, and it's pretty hot I guess, and then suddenly it's like "And then the guy almost slashed her vagina up because he was a psycho! The end." Which is basically just Nin saying "Ha ha, I killed your boner."

In the first story, a dashing guy who's basically The Most Interesting Man in the World from the Dos Equis commercials is bored by normal sex and starts seeking out increasingly perverse experiences. So the first bit, where there's this hot singer lady who goes around to the private booths after her act and blows guys, is - again - pretty hot; but by the end of the story, he's trying to shove his cock into his sleeping preteen son's mouth.

And that's also a debate that continues today: some anti-porn folks say that the ubiquity of porn encourages people to search out ever-more-extreme forms just to find something new. For what it's worth, anecdotally, this has not been my experience.

In any case, I don't know why this guy kept paying Nin. She was pretty much just fucking with him

Update: putting this aside until Jo catches up with me.

Well, quite frankly, Delta of Venus was not for me. I think part of the problem was in reading the foreword that explains how Nin came to be writing erotica, and knowing that she was purposefully trying to be over the top and push the envelope, I found these stories to be neither erotic nor titillating (not that erotica is supposed to be titillating, but I think you get the idea). Instead, I found myself giggling and rolling my eyes more often than not when reading the stories. Perhaps if I didn't know her reasons for writing them beforehand, I would have approached the book differently? Who knows. As a book club pick for my book group, this was a good selection that created some great discussion, but I don't think I would actively pursue more of her erotica in the future on my own. ( )

ספר הארוטיקה הטוב ביותר של כל הזמנים.​ ( )

Some of these stories were a little disturbing. Some were very sweet. Overall an enjoyable book in this genre. I look forward to reading more from Anais Nin. ( )

I like the way Nin treats sex and relationships, and some of her shorter stories are fascinating and erotic in equal measures. Yet I found her style annoying in this novel more so than in her others; she has a habit of ending sentences with comma-separated strings of adjectives which I found tiresome, distracting (as an obvious example). Is it so difficult to use the word 'and'? ( )