Book Review; A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin
Read: 29/12 - 30/12
Format: PhysicalSpoiler free: YesMy rating: ★★★★½
I’m always stolen away by Nin’s mesmerising writing style and the depth of tone within her passages. It almost doesn’t matter what she writes about, her poetic sentences never fail to have a mesmerising effect.
In this instance, however, the subject of her verse was beautifully orchestrated as she successfully builds up and breaks down the inner workings of the mind of her main character, Sabina. Challenging the taboos of 1950s America, Sabina conducts a character assassination on herself while simultaneously maintaining the façade that reinforces this fractured portrayal of the “multitude of Sabinas”.
To many, Anaïs was an icon of freedom from the often suffocating societal constraints placed on women, who has forever changed the landscape of female sexual expression and ownership of identity. Ironically, her books helped her formulate her life of lies meaning this “liberation“ came at an extreme cost to her own psychological freedom.
The twisted structure of her family life during her childhood manifested through all aspects of her adult relationships, cultivating an extreme dependency on her first husband almost as a ‘father’ figure. This can be credited to deep set trauma regarding the unconscious actions of her father, demonstrated throughout all of their personal encounters. For this reason she used the writing process as a form of reflective therapy.
“I write to recreate myself.”
In ‘A Spy in the House of Love’, Nin composes a work of art alluding to her personal life seeming to be almost a coping mechanism to support the expertly managed lies that formulated her life. This literary expression, present in many of her short stories and the original release of her journals, provided her with a sense of stability and identity, bringing a sense of realism to the infidelity.
“Gangsters in the world or art… You can kill with a painting or a book too. Was Sabina one of them? What had she destroyed?”
This quote found in ‘A Spy in the House of Love’ eludes to Nin’s awareness and worry of how her novels will be perceived by the general public. The was a significant danger of misinterpretation through the eyes of women seeking refuge in her evocative writing style and the life it portrayed. Thus cultivating a sense of defiance and rebellion in people who felt they were stifled by social structures not living to their full potential. Most of these individuals would likely not have had the same reaction to Nin’s work, had they known about the extreme anxiety and trauma which played through her mind everyday.
It should be noted, however, that when one reads between the lines, it is clear that a deeper longing for emotional clarity exists within Nin’s impeccably structured sentences. This undoubtably inspired many who suffer from similar emotions to better understand themselves. Upon revelation of the contextual details of her personal life, through the release of her unexpurgated diaries, great shock ensued amongst her readers.
“She had lost herself somewhere along the frontier between her inventions, her stories, her fantasies and her true self.”
Nin dwells on Sabina’s muddled mind and possible causes of her mental torment in ‘A Spy in the House of Love’ much more heavily than in other literary works she has produced. Passages relating to the lie detector give the reader an outsider perspective as well as acting as a catalyst to an almost spiritual realisation in Sabina to accept herself fully. This adds depth and dimension to her beautifully crafted sentences making this novella an extremely compelling read.
“The enemy of love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.”
