Cities of the Interior

<div> <p><i>Ladders to Fire</i> <i>Children of the Albatross</i> <i>The Four-Chambered Heart</i> <i>A Spy in the House of Love</i> <i>Seduction of the Minotaur</i>. Haunting and hypnotic these five novels by Anaïs 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.</p> <p>The full impact of Anaïs 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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p><i>Cities of the Interior</i> fulfills a long-time desire on the part of readers publisher and Anaïs Nin herself to reunite the five novels in a single volume.</p> </div>