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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Duxler's analysis is both personal and professional, June 18, 2002
By A Customer
This isn't, technically speaking, a biography of Anais Nin. Instead, Duxler uses her experience as both a friend of Nin's and a psychotherapist to attempt to understand her subject's complex psychology. The author was clearly deeply touched on a very personal level by the real Nin and when the revelations came out about Nin's sexual experiences with her father, her analysts, and other signs of psychopathology, Duxler was devastated. But rather than hang onto her idealizations or reactively reject Nin, Duxler attempted to bring her considerable clinical powers to bear in an attempt to understand this woman toward whom she felt both love and disappointment. And her psychological analysis is brilliant--nuanced, theoretically sophisticated, and deep. At the end of it all, one is left with an Anais who is terribly human--and a Margot Duxler who herself was transformed by the process of analyzing this humanity. This book is a must-read for anyone who was ever inspired by Nin's artistry and courage or disappointed in her pathology.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Nin Deconstructed - Nin Herself Would Have Hated This Book, October 23, 2007
I'm usually grateful for any new book that gets published on Anais Nin, so if you're a lover of Anais Nin's poetic world like me, you'll want to buy this book. However, I need to give you a bit of caution.
Though the book contains an excellent summary of Nin's entire lifespan, which is perhaps its real value substantively, about 80 pages worth, particularly if you're new to the work and life of Anais Nin (-- it'll save you big time on reading Deidre Bair's bitter biography of Ms. Nin, for sure--), there are 14 pages of sophomoric examination of Nin's Diary from the perspective of Thomas Mallon and his book "A Book of One's Own," a book that has the reputation of asserting no favorable opinion of Nin at all. (This should tip the reader right off that the perspective on Nin and her work that Ms. Duxler is going to offer is not going to be decidedly positive.)
Next, there are more than 40 pages of tedious regurgitation of D.W. Winnicott's theories on object relations, pages which effectively turn Nin into a massive lump of clinical symptoms, a reduction that Ms. Duxler weirdly claims is the opposite of her actual aim in wrtiting the book.
Readers who know Nin will understand, for instance, how angry Nin got when Nancy Scholar Zee attempted to examine Ms. Nin's writings with so-called scholarly techniques and objective tools only to point up Nin's "contradictions" and "lies." Ms. Duxler's psychoanalytical "procedures" are similar in that they are equally duplicitous. Ms. Duxler wields a scalpel with her clinical words on Nin's psyche and writings, an approach that Nin herself would have been appalled and angered by if she were alive today.
Finally, Ms. Duxler concludes (assuming one can follow the twisted logic of her arcane psychoanalytic jargon) that Nin was very sick in many ways and that her Diary did nothing to transform her experience or to help her. (Deirdre Bair already said as much in her condescending biography of Nin! Why do we need another backstabber?)
Ms. Duxler insincerely claims to have been a grateful girlfriend of Nin's! ("Where's the evidence, Girlfriend?") Forget the artistry of Nin's short fiction or the entrancing beauty of her novels and her poetic prose. Ms. Duxler here is too busy burying Nin's psyche and memory to realize Nin actually created beautiful works that will live for future generations to read, unlike this rather ugly book written by a so-called professional who deftly shows she has a very cold, distancing (and soul-destroying) touch.
Ms. Duxler wrote her book not to praise to Nin. This much caution should prove enough.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I loved this book!, October 8, 2002
years after her death, Anais Nin still fascinates both those who knew her and those who may never have met her, but have read her books & stories. I greatly enjoyed learning more about the woman behind the stories & books I have read. Anais Nin intrigues me, and Margot Duxler brilliantly details Nin's life and psychological make-up in this psycho-biography. I highly recommend Seduction: A Portrait of Anais Nin to anyone curious about Anais Nin the person.
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