jazzy_dave | Book 15 - Anais Nin "A Spy In The House Of Love"

Anais Nin "A Spy In The House Of Love" (Penguin Modern Classics)

Maybe because I expected a much simpler tale or maybe because I had higher expectations about what this book would be like, but somehow I couldn't help but feeling deceived by this story.

The short summary at the back cover seemed promising enough: a haunted woman, Sabina, who is unable to remain faithful to her husband Alan. She is helplessly attracted to total strangers and finally driven into fruitless affairs which leave her feeling restless, guilty and edgy. But at the same time, she can't live without these different kind of loves, she has multiple faces, she is specially transformed for each one of her lovers and she can't perform normally with her husband if she doesn't have the excitement of these other amorous adventures.

Don't know exactly why, but for me, it didn't work. The spell wasn't there. I thought the writer tried too hard, sometimes you got lost with her long descriptions of Sabina's red dresses or the feelings she shared with each of her lovers. She wandered too much, didn't focus enough and I felt like an outsider, a voyeur watching some kind of schizophrenic woman acting like a 17 year old. Then there was the repeating guilt and the references to Debussy and Mme Bovary all over the book. You got the point the first time, why did you have to read it all over and over again? I found it tiresome, thank God the book was only 120 pages long!
However, all is not lost because I sort of liked the last pages, where I could find a bit of what I had expected of the whole book. There were some good sentences which gave a glimpse of what the book could have been like, if only the writer had been more humble in her writing and had brought the novel to a more "earthly level".

Some quotations I liked from the book (well, the last pages):

"Let us say I had perverted tendencies: I believed everything I read"
"But if I told the truth, I would be not only lonely but also alone, and I would cause each one great harm"
"The enemy of love is never outside, it's not a man or a woman, it's what we lack in ourselves."

Overall, disappointing.

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From:

w. lotus (from livejournal.com)

It sounds as though Nin was writing autobiographically!

dark-phoenix54.livejournal.com

that's what I was going to say. I've read a little of her diaries and this sounds identical in both content and style. The woman was very self involved!