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"Anaïs Nin's Ladders to Fire interweaves the stories of several women, each emotionally inhibited in her own way: through self-doubt, fear, guilt, moral drift, and distrust. The novel follows their inner struggles to overcome these barriers to happiness and wholeness. The author's own experiences, as recorded in her famous diaries, supplied the raw material for her fiction. It was her intuitive, experimental, and always original style that transformed one into the other. Nin herself show more memorably claimed that "it was the fiction writer who edited the diary." Ladders to Fire is the first book of Nin's continuous novel, Cities of the Interior, which also includes Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur. These loosely interlinked stories develop the characters and themes established in the first volume, leading slowly toward a resolution of inner turmoil and conflict. This Swallow Press reissue of Ladders to Fire includes a new introduction by Nin scholar Benjamin Franklin V, as well as Gunther Stuhlmann's classic foreword to the 1995 edition"-- show lessTags
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In my teens and twenties I was obsessed with many different authors. I’d read a book of theirs, like it, and then devour not only everything they’d written, but also books written by people who influenced them, and others from the same time period. It was during my love affair with Henry Miller that I discovered Anais Nin; twenty-something years later I decided to read her again.
I was in love with Nin before picking up Ladders to the Fire, but this may be my favorite of everything I’ve read by her. As much as I enjoy the way she uses words and the topics she chooses, she had a way of losing me for pages at a time with weird rants about things I didn’t understand. This book had its share of those rants, but they kept closer to show more the story she was trying to tell and didn’t spiral down into babble.
A couple of the things that attracted me to her writing to begin with were that she wrote about very taboo subjects for a woman in the 1940s, and also that a lot of her books take place during that same time period, in Paris. For a while I wanted to move there just because of all the things I read about it in it’s artistic heyday.
Ladders to the Fire focuses on five main characters. The protagonist is Lillian: She’s unhappily married, with children, and spends most of her time partying and falling in love with different people. The other four characters are two men and two women with whom she had different kinds of affairs. The men were childish artist types who treated her more as a mother than a partner, and the women were more on her level. The depths to which Nin made these characters come alive is unmatched by any of her other writing, and most other books by anyone I’ve read.
If you’ve never read Anais Nin, I suggest you head out to your local library or bookstore (or if you live in a literary desert like me, the world wide web) and pick up anything with her name on it. show less
I was in love with Nin before picking up Ladders to the Fire, but this may be my favorite of everything I’ve read by her. As much as I enjoy the way she uses words and the topics she chooses, she had a way of losing me for pages at a time with weird rants about things I didn’t understand. This book had its share of those rants, but they kept closer to show more the story she was trying to tell and didn’t spiral down into babble.
A couple of the things that attracted me to her writing to begin with were that she wrote about very taboo subjects for a woman in the 1940s, and also that a lot of her books take place during that same time period, in Paris. For a while I wanted to move there just because of all the things I read about it in it’s artistic heyday.
Ladders to the Fire focuses on five main characters. The protagonist is Lillian: She’s unhappily married, with children, and spends most of her time partying and falling in love with different people. The other four characters are two men and two women with whom she had different kinds of affairs. The men were childish artist types who treated her more as a mother than a partner, and the women were more on her level. The depths to which Nin made these characters come alive is unmatched by any of her other writing, and most other books by anyone I’ve read.
If you’ve never read Anais Nin, I suggest you head out to your local library or bookstore (or if you live in a literary desert like me, the world wide web) and pick up anything with her name on it. show less
Definitely the weakest link in the series. Lacks the sensuality of later books and otherwise has no interesting story to carry it.
Definitely the weakest link in the series. Lacks the sensuality of later books and otherwise has no interesting story to carry it.
Definitely the weakest link in the series. Lacks the sensuality of later books and otherwise has no interesting story to carry it.
Definitely the weakest link in the series. Lacks the sensuality of later books and otherwise has no interesting story to carry it.
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236+ Works 24,718 Members
Anaïs Nin 1903-1977 Writer and diarist Anaïs Nin was born February 21, 1903 in Neuilly, France to a Catalan father and a Danish mother. She spent many of her childhood years with her Cuban relatives. Later, she became a naturalized American citizen. Nin is best known for her journals,"The Diary of Anais Nin, Vols. I-VII" and her erotic fiction. show more In fact, Nin was one of the raliest writers of erotica for women. She also wrote the book Henry and June, which was made into a movie of the same name in 1990. In 1973 Anaïs Nin received an honorary doctorate from the Philadelphia College of Art. She was elected to the United States National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974. She died of cancer in Los Angeles, California, on January 14, 1977. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Ladders to Fire
- Alternate titles
- Portaat Tuleen
- People/Characters
- Lillian; Djuna; Jay; Sabina
- Important places
- Paris, France
- First words
- Lillian was always in a state of fermentation.
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Statistics
- Members
- 342
- Popularity
- 92,331
- Reviews
- 5
- Rating
- (3.35)
- Languages
- 10 — Catalan, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 21
- ASINs
- 13
