The book of this week is “A Spy in The House of Love” by Anaïs Nin.

The daughter of Joaquín Nin, a Cuban pianist and composer, and Cuban singer Rosa Culmell, Anaïs was raised in Europe, moving to Barcelona and then attending and dropping out of high school in New York City. She met her husband, Hugh Parker Guiler, an experimental filmmaker, in Havana, Cuba in 1923 and shortly thereafter moved to Paris with him to pursue her interest in writing. Her first book, “D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study”, a critical evaluation of D. H. Lawrence, was published in 1932, and took her sixteen days to write.

It was during this time that Anaïs began writing “Under A Glass Bell” a collection of short stories she would later finish in New York City after fleeing the war in France. Now considered one of her finest works, Anaïs could not find a publisher for the collection, and instead founded her own press and brought out the first edition in 1944 with black and white engravings done by her husbands. The book caught the attention of literary critic Edmund Wilson, who wrote in The New Yorker that the stories were “half short stories, half dreams “and “mix a sometimes exquisite poetry with a homely realistic observation” leading the first edition to be sold out in three weeks.

“A Spy in the House of Love” is one of Anaïs’ most recognizable titles from “Cities of Interior” a five-part ‘roman-fleuve’ or continuous novel, began in 1946 and published within the course of the next fifteen years. The book serves as a type of self-reflection to Anaïs’ tormented life during the 1940s, a life full of conflicting passions and identities which Anaïs describes as “a woman at war with herself”. It details the inner conflict of the protagonist, Sabina, a partial mirror of Anaïs, and various fragments in her life that are torn apart through her interactions with five different men. It was inspired by Anaïs sense of rootlessness upon her arrival in New York, stuck in a stifled marriage seeking love and security in diverse men, which often left her feeling desperately alone and even suicidal.

Like Anaïs, Sabina grapples with the feelings of guilt in deceiving her loving husband, while also finding some incitement in the cycles of passion and deceit, calling herself an “international spy in the house of love”. Drifting between realism and surrealism, Anaïs offers a poetic narration of Sabina’s despair in living out a piece of herself with each man, and her innermost desire to wield this pieces together and find a man could love all parts of her.