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A review by harrietannreads
Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin
4.0
TW: sexual violence
This book highlighted the importance of reading a blurb before buying a book aka I didn’t realise I’d bought straight up “high brow” porn (nb: my cover didn’t have erotica written on it so how was I to know).
Anyways this is really well written and I don’t like smut like I hate written sex scenes, I think they suck buuuut Anaïs Nin knows how to do it (apparently this is what she’s kinda know for so quel surpris).
I have a general rule of thumb with this kind of thing which is quite difficult bc it falls under a subjective judgement of tone. For example, I think Lolita is fine because I don’t think it romanticises paedophilia at all, in fact the tone of the book actively condemns Hubert throughout. Comparatively, A Memoir of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez does not have any sort of tone suggesting that what the main character is doing is wrong or perverse in any way. For the most part, I felt Nin’s tone when a character was engaging in a perverted sexual act was judgemental and it told the reader she did not endorse that sort of behaviour. However, at other points I felt she was having a bit too much fun with things that literally just fell into the category of rape. To counter this, I know that most if not all of this erotica was written for a man who was paying for the work to be written in a certain way so perhaps Nin was just doing what she needed to do to get her money.
In sum, morally, I feel dubious about giving this book a high rating because at times I felt Nin wasn’t condemning paedophilia or rape when she should have been. In terms of writing, this was one of the best written books I’ve ever read. Does that cancel out morally questionable behaviour? No. Do I know how to rate books? Also, no.
I am just a girl.
This book highlighted the importance of reading a blurb before buying a book aka I didn’t realise I’d bought straight up “high brow” porn (nb: my cover didn’t have erotica written on it so how was I to know).
Anyways this is really well written and I don’t like smut like I hate written sex scenes, I think they suck buuuut Anaïs Nin knows how to do it (apparently this is what she’s kinda know for so quel surpris).
I have a general rule of thumb with this kind of thing which is quite difficult bc it falls under a subjective judgement of tone. For example, I think Lolita is fine because I don’t think it romanticises paedophilia at all, in fact the tone of the book actively condemns Hubert throughout. Comparatively, A Memoir of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez does not have any sort of tone suggesting that what the main character is doing is wrong or perverse in any way. For the most part, I felt Nin’s tone when a character was engaging in a perverted sexual act was judgemental and it told the reader she did not endorse that sort of behaviour. However, at other points I felt she was having a bit too much fun with things that literally just fell into the category of rape. To counter this, I know that most if not all of this erotica was written for a man who was paying for the work to be written in a certain way so perhaps Nin was just doing what she needed to do to get her money.
In sum, morally, I feel dubious about giving this book a high rating because at times I felt Nin wasn’t condemning paedophilia or rape when she should have been. In terms of writing, this was one of the best written books I’ve ever read. Does that cancel out morally questionable behaviour? No. Do I know how to rate books? Also, no.
I am just a girl.