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Overview: Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) was born in Paris and aspired at an early age to be a writer. An influential artist and thinker, she wrote primarily fiction until 1964, when her last novel, Collages, was published. She wrote The House of Incest, a prose-poem (1936), three novellas collected in The Winter of Artifice (1939), short stories collected in Under a Glass Bell (1944), and a five-volume continuous novel consisting of Ladders to Fire (1946), Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart (1950), A Spy in the House of Love (1954), and Seduction of the Minotaur (1961). These novels were collected as Cities of the Interior (1974). She gained commercial and critical success with the publication of the first volume of her diary (1966); to date, fifteen diary volumes have been published. Her most commercially successful books were her erotica published as Delta of Venus (1977) and Little Birds (1979). Today, her books are appearing digitally, most notably with the anthology The Portable Anais Nin (2011).
Genre: Fiction > Erotic
#1. Ladders To Fire
The principal character, Lillian, a restless spirit who is trapped in a conventional marriage, “travers[ses] a street… She was not attacked, raped, or mutilated. She was not kidnapped for white slavery. But as she crossed the street…she felt as if all these horrors had happened to her, she felt the nameless anguish, the shrinking of the heart, the asphyxiation of pain, the horror of torture whose cries no one hears.”
What makes Ladders to Fire revolutionary is that it was an early attempt to address woman’s quest for completeness in a male-dominated world. Through the relationships of the iconic characters Lillian, Djuna, Sabina and Jay, Nin examines “the destruction in woman…woman’s struggle to understand her own nature,” a theme still relevant today.
#2. Children Of The Albatross
Children of the Albatross is considered by many to be one of Anaïs Nin’s most beautiful books; it is also a groundbreaker in that it eloquently addresses androgyny and homosexuality, which few literary works dared to do in 1940s America. We are introduced to three of Nin’s most significant characters: Djuna, Lillian, and Sabina, all of whom represent different aspects of Nin’s character—serenity, earthiness, and the femme fatale, respectively.
In the first part of the novel, “The Sealed Room,” we witness Djuna’s developing perception of sexuality as we follow her from when, as an adolescent, she has learned to fear powerful, masculine, potent men, to her search for love in young, sexually ambivalent men—the “transparent children”—finally fusing with an airy teenage boy to whom she introduces the world of love and sex.
In the second part, “The Café,” Nin reveals the psychological truth of her relationship with her lover and mentor, Henry Miller, via her main characters’ interactions with the powerful, omnipotent Jay, whom Nin fashioned after Miller.
Children of the Albatross offers the reader Anaïs Nin’s sense of “inner reality” perhaps more beautifully and effectively than in any other work.
#3. The Four-Chambered Heart
The Four-Chambered Heart is one of Nin’s most compelling books, with well-defined characters (Djuna, Rango, and Zora), rhythmic waves of tension, and a powerful climax. Based on Nin’s own relationship with the Peruvian radical Gonzalo More and his wife Helba, The Four-Chambered Heart examines how each of us experiences love in our own way, and how we are sometimes forced by social mores to compartmentalize one relationship in order to preserve the other.
Nin’s use of symbolism has never been more effective: the river Seine represents the immutable force of life, the houseboat is the elusive dream, the shore is reality, and a doll found by a fisherman represents the part of Djuna that has committed suicide to allow the rest of her to grow.
Djuna, through her torturous journey with Rango and Zora, arrives at a conclusion that is bitter yet critical to her survival as a woman seeking an understanding of how the exterior world affects the interior: "…very rarely did midnight strike in two hearts at once, very rarely did midnight arouse two equal desires, and that any dislocation in this, any indifference, was an indication of disunity, of the difficulties, the impossibilities of fusion between two human beings."
#4.A Spy In The House Of Love
Beautiful, bored and bourgeoise, Sabina leads a double life inspired by her relentless desire for brief encounters with near-strangers. Fired into faithlessness by a desperate longing for sexual fulfilment, she weaves a sensual web of deceit across New York. But when the secrecy of her affairs becomes too much to bear, Sabina makes a late night phone-call to a stranger from a bar, and begins a confession that captivates the unknown man and soon inspires him to seek her out…
#5. Seduction Of The Minotaur
Critic Oliver Evans says of Seduction of the Minotaur: “Its symbolism is the most complicated of any of Miss Nin’s longer works…and at the same time it makes more concessions…to the tradition of the realistic novel: the result is a work of unusual richness.”
Consider this passage: “It was the time of the year when everyone’s attention was focused on the moon. ‘The first terrestrial body to be explored will undoubtedly be the moon.’ Yet how little we know about human beings, thought Lillian. All the telescopes are focused on the distant. No one is willing to turn his vision inward… Such obsession with reaching the moon, because they have failed to reach each other, each a solitary planet!”
Seduction of the Minotaur reveals Nin’s struggle for self-awareness through her character Lillian. In a setting that is sumptuously described, with fully developed characters, the plot involves the dichotomy between civilization and the primitive, the dark and bright sides of human nature, with a conclusion that is classic Nin: enlightenment.
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