Anaïs Nin

"Djuna is a woman of forty with an unexplained fortune. A former ballet dancer, her only friends are associates from that world, men who tend to attract her by their least mature qualities. So when she meets seventeen-year-old Paul, she is stirred to her depths. Paul is in flight from his father, and she, for reasons buried in her past, needs the opposition of a father figure to sharpen her own desire." "Set against the cafe life of Montmartre, Children of the Albatross remains one of Nin's most poignant works, which delicately captures the nuances and half-dreamed sensations of adolescent love."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Children of the Albatross

Teodora Živulović

Children of the Albatross is divided into two sections: “The Sealed Room” focuses on the dancer Djuna and a set of characters, chiefly male, who surround her; “The Café” brings together a cast of characters already familiar to Nin's readers, but it is their meeting place that is the focal point of the story. As always, in Children of the Albatross, Nin's writing is inseparable from her life. From Djuna's story, told in “The Sealed Room” through hints and allusions, hazy in their details and chronology, the most important event to emerge is her father's desertion (like Nin's) when she was sixteen. By rejecting realistic writing for the experience and intutitions she drew from her diary, Nin was able to forge a novelistic style emphasizing free association, spontaneity, and improvisation, a technique that finds its parallel in the jazz music performed at the café where Nin's characters meet.

Children of the Albatross

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