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  Winter of Artifice\
 is a collection of novelettes: ‘Stella,’ ‘Winter of Artifice,’ and ‘The Voice.’

Winter of Artifice

I'm a lover of Anais Nin's fiction, and Winter of artifice is one of the greats. A spiderweb, a veil--you either love her or you hate her.   The first story in this collection--in my edition of it, all of them are different, for historical/censorship reasons. The history of the publication of this book is fascinating. "Stella", is a heartbreakingly lovely portrait of the actress Luise Rainer, who was a very close friend of Nin's, a stunning artist who was incredibly uneasy with her stardom. (Though the interaction with the father is all Nin's own story). So many of its images stay with me. Make sure, if you read this collection, that you get one that has "Stella" is in it. Although the Paris facsimile edition, put out by Blue Sky Press, has a story that appears in none of the others, "Djuna" which is a portrait of June Miller, well known from the Diaries and the film 'Henry and June'. Here's Stella:  "Stella sat in a small dark room and watched her own figure acting on the screen. Stella watched her "double" moving in the light, and she did not recognize her. She almost hated her. … The shock came from some violent contrast between Stella's image of herself and the projected self she could not recognize at all…. the image on the screen was completely washed of the coloring and tones of sadness…"  "Sitting next to her, they [the audience] did not see her, intent on loving the woman on the screen. Because she was giving to many what most gave to the loved one… They were permitted to witness the exposure of being in a moment of high feeling, of tenderness, indulgence, dreaming, abandon, sloppiness, mischievousness, which was only uncovered in moments of love and intimacy… The woman on the screen was a stranger to her. … What stella had seen on the screen, the figure of which she had been so instantaneously jealous, was the free stella. What did not appear on the screen was the shadow of Stella, her demons, doubt and fear. And Stella was jealous. She was not only jealous of a more beautiful woman, but of a free woman."  And this is the image that will always haunt me:  "Once when Stella was on the stage acting a love scene, which was taking place after a scene in a snowstorm, one of the flakes of artificial snow remained on the wing of her small and delicate nose…. all during the is scene there lay the snowflake catching the light and flashing signals of gently humorous inappropriateness and misplacement. The snowflake gave the scene an imperfection which touched the heart and brought all the feelings of the watchers to converge and rest upon than infinitely moving absurdity of the misplaced snowflake…"  I will always think of Luise Rainer and that snowflake.

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