Collages is Anaïs Nin's last work of fiction, and is, as the title suggests, a collection of interwoven stories, opening and closing with the passage: "Vienna was the city of statues. They were as numerous as the people who walked the streets. They stood on the top of the highest towers, lay down on stone tombs, sat on horseback, kneeled, prayed, fought animals and wars, danced, drank wine and read books made of stone."The central character, Renate, is a sort of "master of ceremonies" for Nin's modern fairy tales, as she floats through the narrative and communes, in one way or another, with each of the "storytellers." Among them are: Varda, the artist whose interaction with his daughter causes him to spin story upon story in order to win her over to his artistic way of thinking; Henri the chef, who names each of his dishes after celebrities and has stories for the most interesting of them; Nina, a young woman whose spontaneous musings lead casual observers to believe she is insane; Nobuko, the Japanese actress whose charming commentaries and letters are laden with magical yet incorrect English; Bruce, whose betrayals to Renate with boys are written in story form hidden in Chinese puzzle boxes; Count Laudromat, the exiled royal whose father-in-law is an owner of laudromats; the French Consul and his wife, who are writers with extremely different outlooks on love and passion; John Wilkes, the "millionaire patron of the arts" who is actually a gardener; Dr. Mann, an Israeli with the unusual pastime of meeting and kissing famous women authors; and the enigmatic Judith Sands, who may have actually "written" Collages.Collages is Nin's most light-hearted writing, and, in that sense, is perhaps her most entertaining book. As Henry Miller commented, "The best of collages fall apart with time; these will not." Anais Nin (1903-1977) was born in Neuilly-Sur-Seine, near Paris, and was the daughter of a renowned pianist and composer, Joaquin Nin. Abandoned by her father in 1913, she and her family traveled to New York, where she began her now famous diary, comprised of some 35,000 pages over a period of six decades. When the first volume of 'The Diary of Anais Nin' was published in 1966, it began Nin's meteoric surge to fame. However, often overlooked are the works of fiction she created, beginning with 'The House of Incest' in 1936, which was followed by a then-banned edition of a collection of novellas under the title 'The Winter of Artifice.' This original edition has been republished for the first time in 2007. Perhaps Nin's most acclaimed fiction is the series of short stories in 'Under a Glass Bell,' which she self-published in New York during the 1940s when no commercial publisher would take the risk. She then began a series of novels that were interconnected and finally collected into one volume entitled 'Cities of the Interior.' Her final novel was 'Collages,' about which Henry Miller said, "Even the finest collages fall apart with time; these will not."Anais Nin was one of the 20th century's most innovative and compelling artist, and now her works are finally appearing in digital format.
