Waste of Timelessness

Every posthumous Nin publication is a window into the workshop, and this is the earliest window: the stories predate her first published book, the 1932 study of D. H. Lawrence, and show what she was writing when the diary was still private practice and fiction still an ambition. The settings are her actual map of those years — Paris, the suburbs, artists' parties, women restless inside comfortable marriages — and the heroines are trial runs for the women of the continuous novel.

The collection appeared from Magic Circle Press in 1977 in the wave of publishing that followed the Diary's success, when everything in the trunk found readers. Its interest is honest rather than inflated: no one claims these are finished Nin, but the title story's image — a woman leaving a life measured in wasted timelessness — is already unmistakably hers, and readers of the mature books will recognize seed after seed.

Sixteen short pieces from around 1930. Recurring figures: young wives restless in arranged comfort, artists measuring themselves against Paris, women testing how much interior life a conventional frame can hold. The title story sets the register — a woman taking stock of a life spent waiting inside timelessness — and the rest range from sketches and fables to small finished portraits. Read them as the workshop floor of the later books: postures tried on, images discovered, the diary's raw material reaching for fictional form for the first time.