Book Overview
Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, Seduction of the Minotaur. Haunting and hypnotic, these five novels by Ana s Nin began in 1946 to appear in quiet succession. Though published separately over the next fifteen years, the five were conceived as a continuous experience-a continuous novel like Proust's, real and flowing as a river.
The full impact of Ana s Nin's genius is only to be found through reading the novels in context and in succession. They form a rich, luminous tapestry whose overall theme Nin has called "woman at war with herself." Characters, symbols appear and reappear: now one, now another unfolding, gradually revealing, changing, struggling, growing, and Nin had forged an evocative language all her own for the telling.
"The diary taught me that there were no neat ends to novels, no neat denouement, no neat synthesis," she explains. "So I began an endless novel, a novel in which the climaxes consisted of discoveries in awareness, each step in awareness becoming a stage in the growth like the layers in trees."
Cities of the Interior fulfills a long-time desire on the part of readers, publisher, and Ana s Nin herself to reunite the five novels in a single volume.
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Customer Reviews
Rated 4 starsWhat a Grand Description of People and their Motivations
This book differs greatly from her better known Little Birds and Delta of Venus. The characters Are The Story. It is rich in description, and the quirks and strivings of each persona is so minutely described, that it rings true these many decades later. I am sure a person in the book will remind you of someone you know.
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Rated 5 starsLook into your lovers' hearts...
Though any of the five mini masterpieces that constitute this cyclical novel ("Ladders to Fire", "Children of the Albatross", "The Four-Chambered Heart", "A Spy in the House of Love", and "Seduction of the Minotaur") stand on their own as seperate and equally moving novels, I'm finding it difficult to describe the importance "Cities of the Interior" has held in my (and countless others') heart since my first reading of it...
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