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Rating: 
Summary: Offers No Sense of Artistic Evolution
Review: This volume was the fourth in the published series of expurgated diaries beginning with the 1931 manuscript diaries of the prolific Anais Nin. Unfortunately, although this volume begins with diary entries written some thirteen years after those in the first published volume, the reader has no sense that Nin's craft of diary-keeping as an art form evolved or matured in those thirteen years. It is impossible to tell whether this stems from Nin's habit of editing and reworking her material over the years, thus possibly refining early entries until they were on a par with her later work, or whether Nin was simply never able to improve on her first work inspired by her meeting Henry Miller. Deidre Bair's biography of Nin reveals the interesting tidbit that Nin stopped keeping diaries in volume form some time during 1946, partway through this volume. After 1946 (particularly since Nin soon found herself living with two men, one on each coast), she jotted down notes on whatever papers were handy and tossed the notes into manila folders. The decrease in quality associated with this apparent lack of care shows, I think, as this volume progresses. The life she was then leading, although distracting her from the diary, hardly constituted a work of art in and of itself. Nin spends much of this volume "ensorcelling" teenage boys as a woman in her forties. She declares frequently that she identifies with the young, and surrounds herself with them in preference to the rigid folks her own age. A more jaded view of Nin's behavior at this time is that men her own age were able to see through her games in a way that boys did not have the life experience to do. Although she frequently claims tremendous insight and understanding of psychoanalysis, she is ultimately blind to the uglier aspects of the larger patterns of her life at this time. Because this is the expurgated version of the diary, this volume omits a critical event: Anais's meeting Rupert Pole, whom she would later marry, in 1947. Verdict: only for hardcore Anais Nin fans.
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