Anaïs Nin

This story explores the inner world of a fascinating and complex woman whose affairs with four men express all the duplicity and fragmentation of self involved in the search for love

A Spy in the House of Love

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

Grace McCarter

Sabina placed the Firebird on the phonograph. The delicate footsteps of the Firebird were heard at first through infinite distance, each step rousing the phosphorescent sparks from the earth, each note a golden bugle to marshal delight. A jungle of dragon tails thrashing in erotic derisions, a brazier of flesh-smoking prayers, the multiple debris of the stained glass fountains of desire.

With bitter irony she remembered ruins she had seen in Guatemala, and an American visitor saying: 'I hate ruins, I hate dilapidation, tombs. But this new town at the beach was infinitely more static and more disintegrated than the ancient ruins. The clouds of otony, uniformity which hung over the new, neat mansions, the impeccable lawns, the dustless garden furniture. 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.

When she did finally fall asleep it was the restless sleep of the night watchman continuously aware of danger and of the treacheries of time seeking to cheat her by permitting clocks to strike the passing hours when she was not awake to grasp their contents.

He turned his eyes fully upon her, now a glacial blue; they were impersonal and seemed to gaze beyond her at all women who had dissolved into one, but who might, at any moment, again become dis- solved into all. This was the gaze Sabina had always encountered in Don Juan, everywhere, it was the gaze she mistrusted. It was the alchemy of desire fixing itself upon the incarnation of all women into Sabina for a moment but as easily by a second process able to alchemize Sabina into many others.

lulu

Trust alone is not love, desire alone is not love, illusion is not love, dreaming is not love. All these paths leading you out of yourself, it is true, and so you thought they led to another but you never reached the other.

The enemy of love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.

There is no bleaker moment in the life of the city than that one which crosses the boundary lines between those who have not slept all night and those who are getting to work.

march🐇

“She had lost herself somewhere along the frontier between her inventions, her stories, her fantasies and her true self. The boundaries had become effaced, the tracks lost; she had walked into pure chaos, and not a chaos which carried her like the galloping of romantic riders in operas and legends, but which suddenly revealed the stage props: A papier-mâché horse.

	She had lost her sails, her cape, her horse, her seven-league boots, and all of them at once. She was stranded in the semidarkness of a winter evening.

	Then, as if all the energy and warmth had been drawn inward for the first time, killing the external body, blurring the eyes, dulling the ears, thickening the palate and tongue, slowing the movements of the body, she felt intensely cold and shivered with the same tremor as leaves, feeling for the first time some withered leaves of her being detaching themselves from her body.”

This material may be protected by copyright.

“In homeopathy there is a remedy called pulsatile for those who weep at music.”

Kat Albanese

Her feeling of fragility was so strong that she was startled by the appearance of a woman at her left, who walked in step with her. Sabina glanced at her profile and was comforted by her tallness, the assurance of her walk. She too was dressed in black, but walked without terror.

And then she vanished. The mirror had come to an end. Sabina had been confronted with herself, the life-size image walking beside the shrunk inner self, proving to her once more the disproportion between her feelings and external truth.

Srijita Sarkar 

"In homeopathy there is a remedy called pulsatile for those who weep at music."

Mobility in love became a condition for your existence. There is nothing shameful in seeking safety measures.

We are much more severe judges of our own acts. We judge our thoughts, our secret intents, our dreams even

The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves.

What I corrupted was what is called the truth in favor of a more marvelous world.

'I never found a way to get what I wanted except by robbery,'

'I have never found a way to get what I wanted except by lies.'"

if you handle me roughly you will lose much of the evidence. I don't want you to taint that fragile coat of astonishing colors created by my illusions, which no painter has ever been able to reproduce

Strange, isn't it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions give them

here isthe notorious imposter, the international spy in the house of love. (Or should I specify: in the house of many loves?)

when the dancers vanish behind columns or dense hills of shadows, no one asks them for passports or identifications

people feel that we are in love with our work, and that one should not be paid for doing what you most love to do.

It was perhaps at such a moment of isolation that Madame Bovary had taken the poison. It was the moment when the hidden life is in danger of being exposed, and no woman could bear the condemnation.

"When you are hurt, you travel as far as you can from the place of the hurt,"

At that moment Sabina had been stripped of all mystery and Jay had tasted what the mystery contained: the most ardent frenzy of desire.

Jay could see the images passing through her eyes like a film being censored.

He was about to say something devastating, which he called his brutal honesty.

Dressed in red and silver, she evoked the sounds and imagery of fire engines as they tore through the streets of NewYork, alarming the heart with the violent accelerations of catastrophes.

The first time he had looked at her he had felt: "Everything will burn!"

Mia Hamilton

gülsu

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.

reneé amelia 

2.5 stars, was a somewhat enjoyable short read and beautifully descriptive - i am going to read some more of anaïs nins work, hopefully something more engaging/ interesting though

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

It follows Sabina, an actress, and her romantic escapades while seeking exorcism from the greatness of her guilt and loneliness. She is an oil spillage of desire, staining each encounter with a grease too sebaceous to wash off. It is the fear of surveillance, the knack for concealment — to engage in one’s rebellious cravings without repercussion. She is an actress doing her part, consistently putting on faces and committing to the bit. Nin makes me feel like I’m a detective intruding Sabina’s most intimate moments, feeling her turmoils alongside her. This is my first Anaïs Nin book, and I’m beyond impressed by the motion of her words, the imagery of abstractions we normally find hard to verbalize. Just the book to start off my 2024!

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.

Darda Nella

c🍎

Elisha 

Grete Liina Tuuksam

riya ☆

Alex Noble

Marek R

eileen sheats

roberta

Amelia Raptis

Marine

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