Name: A Spy in the House of Love
Rating: 3.625 (28 reviews)
ISBN: 9780671871390

Anaïs Nin

Sabina struggles to cope with her feelings of guilt as she loses herself in a series of different men

A Spy in the House of Love

Srijita Sarkar 

Passion, and illusion, are an intense but narrow lens.

She could not sit still. She talked profusely and continuously with a feverish breathlessness like one in fear of silence. She sat as if she could not bear to sit for long; and, when she rose to buy cigarettes, she was equally eager to return to her seat.

Also the cape held within its folds something of what she imagined was a quality possessed exclusively by man: some dash, some audacity, some swagger of freedom denied to woman

The feelings which flow through her and which carry her along are of love, protection, devotion. These feelings create a powerful current on which she floats. Because of their strength they have engulfed all her doubts, as in the case of fanatic devotions to a country, a science, an art, when all minor crimes are absolved by the unquestioned value of the aim.

she wished for his absolution so that she might sleep deeply.

Happiness had been defined once as the absence of fever.

Desire made a volcanic island on which they lay in a trance, feeling the subterranean whirls lying beneath them, dance floor and table and the magnetic blues uprooted by desire, the avalanches of the body's tremors.

For a moment she saw her love anxieties as resembling those of a drug addict, of alcoholics, of gamblers. The same irresistible impulse, tension, compulsion and then depression following the yielding to the impulse, revulsion, bitterness, depression, and the compulsion once more...

Debris of stained glass wafted up by the seas, splintered by the radium shafts of the sun and the waves and tides of sensuality covered their bodies, desires folding in every lapping wave like an accordion of aurora borealis in the blood.

She opened her eyes to contemplate the piercing joy of her liberation: she was free, free as man was, to enjoy without love...How good not to love

I had already betrayed. To be always ahead, a little ahead of the expected betrayals by life.

I am an international spy in the house of love.

Both anxiety and humor became interchangeable

Wits and good acting were employed for such justifiable ends: to protect human beings from unbearable truths

The men and women at the beach, all in one dimension, without any magnetism to bring them together, zombies of civilization, in elegant dress with dead eyes.

the pleasure he had given her ignited her body like flowing warm mercury darting through the veins

She almost shouted out with pain, shouted at the moon,the deaf, impassible goddess of desire shining down mockingly at an empty night, an empty bed.

He runs away, war is less terrifying to him than life

Mia Hamilton

I just want to stare mindlessly while sitting at a corner of a sidewalk hearing Sabina talk about everything while she finds comfort in smoking and I'd sit idly by listening to her talk about how amazing and tiresome the world is; her mistakes; and her guilt with everything. I'd think of how vile she is to have constantly hurt other people, but feel envious of her freedom as well. In those vulnerably fleeting moments, I'd ponder why I would have given her a hug still.

Sarah Sammis

I often find parallels between what I'm reading and what I'm watching and with A Spy in the House of Love I find an affinity between the book and a film, Dark City if that film were told from the point of view of John's "wife" and I also see an affinity with the anime series, Serial Experiments Lain. In all three cases they are stories of women struggling to find themselves among the artifice in which they live, whether it is self created or created by others. To put in terms the book uses, Sabina is like Duchamp's painting of Nude Descending a Staircase; she is a series of frames, a moment of action captured on canvas, but not a single distilled representation of that woman. No one will know what that woman looked like but they will know how she walked down the steps.

Sabina has memories of past loves, past adventures, past meetings but so current feeling of who she is. She is a name. She has a husband who loves her dearly but she is constantly running from him looking for love among her artist friends. There is also clearly a strong note of autobiography in the last third of the book where Sabina meets up with the artist's enclave in New York and that gives this otherwise sensuous tale a note of sadness.

heleen de boever

I know no one who evokes the extremes of emotion and physical sensation as convincingly as Anaïs Nin. Exactly that might be the problem. There is no pause in the intensity of her prose. It's arresting, yes, breathless, certainly - restless, desperate, at times despairingly hopeful, and it's all of these things at once. Her sentences never stutter before gaining momentum again. They gallop along, endlessly, with sweat on their tongues, urged on by a writer who doesn't believe in taking a breath when that breath is not one of infinite arousal. Her writing style therefore can be quite baroque at best, flowery at worst. And yet, and YET... Perhaps this is exactly Nin's charm; exactly the thing that makes me return to her. I feel like you cannot read her books without being prepared to succumb to her energetic pace and the density of her writing style. It is exactly that density that reveals a fragile intimacy - a gate if you will - able to reveal parts of life you're only hesitant to admit existed, let alone aspire to.

march🐇

riya ☆

Anais Nin

Beautiful, bored and bourgeoise, Sabina leads a double life inspired by her relentless desire for brief encounters with near-strangers. Fired into faithlessness by a desperate longing for sexual fulfilment, she weaves a sensual web of deceit across New York. But when the secrecy of her affairs becomes too much to bear, Sabina makes a late night phone-call to a stranger from a bar, and begins a confession that captivates the unknown man and soon inspires him to seek her out...

A Spy In The House Of Love

Marek R

roberta

Amelia Raptis

Julia R. Santos 

A Spy in the House of Love, whose heroine Sabina is deeply divided between her drive for artistic and sexual expression and social restrictions and self-created inhibitions, echoes Anaïs Nin's personal struggle with sex, love, and emotional fragmentation.

A Spy in the House of Love

Reviews

Highlights