Delta of Venus by Anais Nin

(Purchase book at Amazon)

(Watch film on Amazon Prime)

Delta of Venus is a collection of erotic stories. In the preface of the book, Anais Nin has mentioned that she wrote these stories around 1940 for an ‘anonymous client’ of a book collector she knew. It all started with Henry Miller, her famous friend, who wrote stories for the ‘client’ for money. Gradually, he involved her and their other friends in the project. They all set their wild imaginations free and started writing stories of lust and desire to order. And the stories Anais Nin wrote were what later became ‘Delta of Venus’.

It is obvious that these stories are less literature and more porn. Because the anonymous buyer of these stories kept telling her to dump poetry and philosophy and focus more on raw sexual descriptions. It was not an easy task for the writer, though. As a consequence, you can see the unpleasant tension of a fight between poesy and porn throughout the book. The struggle between her poetic imagination and the demand of her client for narrations of hardcore sexual encounters is clearly evident from every line of the book. Nevertheless, though the stories in the book are mostly superficial descriptions of sexual acts, she has somehow managed to strike a fine balance and come out clean without betraying literature altogether.

Since these tales of promiscuous lust were not penned for the world to view in print but were created exclusively for the private ownership, and to satiate the desire, of a porn-addicted reader for a fee, one cannot evaluate and criticize this book like any general work of fiction. It was created for a different audience and not for the general booklover.

Nin has evidently experimented with all sorts of fantasies in her stories to infuse them with variety to satisfy her client. And many sexual themes are those considered perversions, like incest, paedophilia, rape, and even necrophilia and bestiality. I only liked one story in the entire collection as it had some literary value and was not mere pornography. It also carried an element of incest, but I felt there was a human story and some room for emotions in it, which was hard to find in other stories.

Around 1970, the author decided to release the collection for publication as one of the earliest women’s writings of erotica, to show the world the women’s view of sexual experiences, if nothing else. She strongly believed that there was an unbridgeable difference between men’s and women’s styles of writing erotica, and neither could replace the other. However, she died before realizing the plan and it was published posthumously.

I also watched the movie based on the book after reading it. It is not an exact reproduction of the literary work but only represented it partially with select characters and events from it. The entire film revolves mainly around Elena who becomes its central character. The film is made by Zalman King and you are delighted to see that it has rectified the deficiencies you encountered in the book.

The film is nothing but visual poetry. And the soft, languid strains of the background score make it even more enticing. Unlike the book, it is not all shallow accounts of episodes of licentious sex and bland narrations of carnal desire. It is something beyond the erotic too — a profound and charming emotional journey. The frames, sounds, hues, and every other element in the movie, not to mention every actor who has played a role in it whether major or minor, work in perfect harmony to create a masterpiece…