Cities of the Interior (5)

Seduction of the Minotaur

Critic Oliver Evans says of : “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

( was originally published as in 1958)

Although Anaïs Nin found in her diaries a profound mode of self-creation and confession, she could not reveal this intimate record of her own experiences during her lifetime. Instead, she turned to fiction, where her stories and novels became artistic “distillations” of her secret diaries. A Spy in the House of Love, whose heroine Sabina is deeply divided between her drive for artistic and sexual expression, on the one hand, and social restrictions and self-created inhibitions, on the other, echoed Nin’s personal struggle with sex, love, and emotional fragmentation. Written when Nin’s own life was taut with conflicting loyalties, her protagonist Sabina repeatedly asks herself, can one indulge in one's sensual restlessness, the fantasies, the relentless need for adventure without devastating consequences?