Anäis Nin: A Sea of Lies by Léonie Bischoff

The subtitle is surprising, particularly for a book as sympathetic to Nin as this one is. Creator Léonie Bischoff clearly means that it's Nin's sea, her lies, but she also is almost entirely on Nin's side throughout the book. Sure, she deceived her husband to have an affair with Henry Miller (and, as I understand it, also with Miller's wife, June, though Bischoff doesn't show the two of them getting physical in this story), but Bischoff can see why and can justify it.

Perhaps I should back up slightly. Anäis Nin: A Sea of Lies is a 2020 bande desinée by Bischoff - the subtitle in French is Sur la Mer des Mensonges, which is the subtly different "On the Sea of Lies" - translated by Jenna Allen and published in English for the first time last year. It's a tightly focused biographical story, taking place in the early Thirties - some flashbacks to the Teens are dated, but the main action isn't, so it's difficult to say how much time is covered - centering on Nin, her relationship with Miller, and what I guess I would characterize as her growing realization that she wants and needs multiple relationships with different men. To be frank, she seems to be the kind of person - they come in both men and women - who meets new fascinating people and almost immediately decides they need to consume that person, usually with sex. (They also often have artistic aspirations - a few of them, like Nin, may actually do something with those aspirations. But being artistic, which of course includes lots of sex with lots of people in dangerous transgressive ways, is the first and most important thing.)

Bischoff does manage to keep Nin sympathetic, even as she tells the story of Nin juggling a marriage - which was supposed to be a melding of artistic equals  - with affairs with Miller, a cousin, her psychiatrist, and even (most famously) her own father. (I may have missed some. It becomes difficult to understand how Nin had time to get anything else accomplished in life with all of this bed-hopping.) I think the main action of the book covers two or three years in the early Thirties - when Nin was living in Paris, before she returned to New York - but the lack of dates tends to make it all seem like it's happening during a short period of time.

Bischoff accomplishes a lot of that through her art, which has a lightness and an imaginative power throughout, with shimmery, almost pastel colors rising and falling throughout the narrative, most dominant when Nin is alone or in the throes of passion. She also keeps Nin centered throughout: our viewpoint is always on her, her actions are central, her concerns are the core of the book.

A reader might think that Nin is yet another far-too-self-indulgent would-be artist, and there's some validity to that. I think things got more complicated and overwrought for her later, with a second bigamous marriage among other things. But, in this time-frame, it's mostly normal adultery - well, aside from a grown woman having sex with her domineering father not being within a million miles of "normal" in any world - and Bischoff believably ties it all into Nin's artistic growth and ambitions.

So this is a lovely examination of a complicated, messy artist, in a style and manner that is vastly more tasteful and lush than a reader might expect from a book so centrally about having sex with a whole bunch of different people.