Minator'u Kışkırtmak

Cities of the Interior #5

by Anaïs Nin, Püren Özgören (Translator)

Aşk, ihanet, bağlılık, fedakârlık, güven gibi insan ruhunu biçimlendiren yapıtaşları üzerinde yükselen bir nehir roman "İçsel Kentler"; siz de şu an onun beşinci ve son kapısındasınız. Geçtiğiniz her kapıyla ruhunuzun derinliklerine biraz daha indiniz.
Lilian, Golconda'da bu kez. Oradaki insanlara bakarak "söylenmek istenenler" arasındaki bağlantıları başka bir gözle görüyor, çocukluğunun bağzı anlarıyla erotizm bağlantısını kuruyor ve ölümle yüzleşiyor.
Çocuklarına dönerken bindiği uçaktaki kadın, aynı Lilian değildir artık.
Ateş Merdivenleri, Albatrosun Çocukları, Dört Odalı Kalp ve Aşk Evindeki Casus'tan sonra Minator'u Kışkırtmak kapısını da kapattığınızda, aynadaki yansımanıza başka bir gözle bakacaksınız.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Literature, Erotica, Literary Fiction, Novels, Sexuality

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Writer and diarist, born in Paris to a Catalan father and a Danish mother, Anaïs Nin spent many of her early years with Cuban relatives. Later a naturalized American citizen, she lived and worked in Paris, New York and Los Angeles. Author of avant-garde novels in the French surrealistic style and collections of erotica, she is best known for her life and times in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volumes I-VII (1966-1980).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana%C3%...

Reviews

[Mighty Aphrodite · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un bagno di luce con gli occhi spalancati nel sole, la musica delle onde del mare in sottofondo, in una immobilità che non congela l’essere, ma gli permette di andare più a fondo, di immergersi in uno stato di consapevolezza tale da abbattere ogni barriera, da distruggere ogni maschera, ogni bugia, ogni dolore.

È davvero possibile scappare dal proprio passato e da sé stessi, reinventarsi e calarsi pienamente in un nuovo personaggio, in una nuova sé stessa per una vita diversa? Questo sembra essere l’unico vero desiderio di Lillian, approdata nel sole abbacinante del Messico per un ingaggio. Chi era prima di quel momento? Chi era prima di affondare i propri piedi nella terra calda e umida di una realtà così diversa, primitiva, istintiva, bruciante?

“C’erano alcuni stati d’animo che somigliavano ai tempi prima dell’inizio del mondo, erano senza forma, senza disegno, non disgiunti. Caos. Montagne, mare e terra indifferenziati, come nebulose, avviluppati. Stati della mente e sentimenti che non sarebbero mai stati visibili in nessuna radiografia. Densi, invisibili, inaccessibili alle persone articolate. Avrebbe vissuto lì, si sarebbe persa. A ogni nuova preoccupazione o domanda sarebbe scivolata in quel mare di rinascita. E il suo corpo le sarebbe stato restituito. Avrebbe sentito il suo viso come un viso, di carne, abbronzato, caldo, e non come una maschera per nascondere i pensieri.”

Non lo ricorda, o almeno così crede. Non è più Lillian, non è più la donna che si è lasciata alle spalle. Il passato è così lontano, così nebuloso, e lei vuole solo bagnarsi nelle acque di una nuova vita, affondarci dentro fino a esplodere, fino ad accettare il caos che è sempre stata, il caos che ha represso per tutta la vita sotto lo sguardo indagatore di una madre insoddisfatta di lei.

Continua a leggere qui: https://parlaredilibri.wordpress.com/...

[Diana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was already warned that this book is very very peak white sensual soulful woman ~Finding Herself~ in the tropics. And WOW I tell you... it really was. I mean at that time, Anais Nin probably could not conceive how her well-intentioned idealisation of “natives” in Mexico (she even idealises the beggars!) is damaging and she was probably having a far more compassionate view than most with their colonial mindset but it was still so jarring to read! Natives would be compared to animals even! I really do love the words of Anais Nin but this book was a bit confusing because the setting seemed not very important except to really show her gift of sultry descriptions. Although I guess she also wanted a background that would aid in showing the tension between the “western developed” world and its rationality against the “undeveloped indigenous” untouched by modernity and more in touch with spirituality/their inner selves/passion. “The primitives were wise to retain their rituals” at one point, was said. The lazy native, natives who run amok, and other colonial stereotypes were in abundance. The plot was ?? Confusing ? And secondary really to the ponderings that the characters had, the interiority of the protagonist and the monologues on the human condition and desire that she loves to do. The ending was so fractured from the rest of the book too and was clearly her running off with her writing fictionally about Henry miller and June. Also this is where the phrase that was wrongfully attributed to her was from! “We do not see people as they are, we see them as we are.” It’s actually a Talmudic phrase. Anyway if you are a fan of Anais as I am, maybe this book is worth a miss.

[ciel · Rating 5 out of 5]

GORGEOUS. the way you can feel the four elements of the four prior novels combine, intersect, flow together. an experience. take me to golconda pls.

i'm in particularly a fan of the bit in golconda. the tropical heat, scent, rhythms, sweat, dizziness, vibrancy, and noise were such a phenomenal sensory explosion. one can feel the ties to anaïs' actual travels through mexico. she's electric.

one of the things i love so much about her are how the (clishé) european, american, and south american sentiments or styles come together in her writings. and of course her writing about dance and music are wow x3.

[D.J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Many people have told me to read Anais Nin. I don't have to any more.

[Eve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full review to come because I have a lot to say about this one. Do I think this was a perfect book by any means? No. Did I have immense fun annotating and analysing it? Absolutely. Do I think this book presented interesting ideas that are worthy of discussion? Also yes

[Murat Dural · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zorlandığım, ilerledikçe yazarın yapmak istediğini safha safha anladığım, tam bir cinsiyet arkeolojisi tam bir kadınlık kazısı tam bir psikolojik bilim insanı tavrı. Tekrar etmekte fayda var; bu kitaba başlıyorsanız kendi labirentlerinize giriş yapıyor kendi minotaurunuzla karşılaşmaya hazırlanıyorsunuz demektir. Tüm o zorluğa, çabaya değdi.

[DonutKnow · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were some good insights, but maybe it was just me because I felt I really had to reach to understand what was going on. There was just too much extra information, metaphor, description and references that I got lost most of the time, and in fact, I just skipped through the last 50 pages.
I feel spent after having to endure the whole book, but at least I know now, that when a book is bad for me, I should just stop and find another. There are just too many books in the world to waste on bad experiences :)

[Lucia · Rating 4 out of 5]

“ we may seem to forget a person, a place a state of being a past life but meanwhile what we are doing, is selecting new actors, seeking the closest reproduction to the friend, the lover, the husband we are trying to forget, in order to reenact the drama with understudies. And one day, we open our eyes and there we are repeating the same story.”

“A long time ago” said Michael, “I decided never to fall in love again. I have made of desire an anonymous activity.”
“but not to feel… Not to love… It’s like dying with in life Michael.”

[Dana Jerman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dreamy but approachable. A good lazy coffee shop read. Of course not Nin’s finest, but for that reason alone just start instead with her at Little Birds or Spy in the House of Love.

[Ishq · Rating 3 out of 5]

(I want to rate this 3.5 stars)

This is the kind of story still prevalent today where a westerner who want to escape their own demons find themselves or their true nature as a broken being in the faraway tropics, meeting other emigres or fugitive of hearts.

The native people of Mexico are at best minor, posed as the exotic other necessary for the westerners' inner quests. They never get to really speak nor get out of a passive role except, of course, when they cheat, hyper-sexualized or to bring death to the westerners. The landscape is likewise romanticized with a sensuality and dreaminess the uptight westerners both yearn and fear.

There are many intimate section about a (European-educated) woman's quest to her own voice and agency, in self-knowledge and analysis, and I like the liberty Nin took in shifting the narrative course across present and past. I like also the metaphor of one's memory and inner struggle as a subterranean city that overlaps what is deemed as present-reality, but I suppose Kafka and his readers will not like this book too much because the text is cloaked with just too many metaphors. They seem forced, and Anais Nin has written better books.

[Meghan Fidler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nin has a way of capturing people through their relationships, making them fluid, as we all are, in their travels with one another. This is a narrative quality I have always found brilliant, and it allows the characters in the work to become recognizable, almost as if they were written from one's own memories and encounters.

"An airline’s beauty queen arrived at the beach. She walked and carried herself as if she knew she were on display and should hold herself as still as possible, arranged for other’s eyes as if to allow them to photograph her. The way she held herself and did not look at others, made her seem an image cut out of a poster which incited young men to go to war. A surface unblurred, unruffled, no frown of thought to mar the brow, she exposed herself to other’s eyes with no sign of recognition She neither transmitted nor received messages to and from the nerves and senses. She walked toward others without emitting any vibrations of warmth or cold. She was a plastic perfection of hair, skin, teeth, body, and form which could not rust, or wrinkle, or cry. It was as if only synthetic elements had been used to create her."

Nin's descriptive skill spills from people into the place, a mythic Mexican town called Golconda, giving the environment the same depth and texture as the characters.

"Just as music was an unbroken chain in Golconda, so were the synchronizations of colour. Where the flowers ended their jeweled displays, their pagan illuminated manuscripts, fruits took up the gradations. Once or twice, her mouth full of fruit, she stopped. She had the feeling that she was eating the dawn."

"In the car, driving back in the violent sun, no one talked. The light filled the eyes, the mind, the nerves, the bones, and it was only when they drove through shade that they came out of this anesthesia of sunlight. In the shade they would find woman washing clothes in the river, children swimming naked, old men sitting on fences, and the younger men being the plough, or diving huge wheeled carts pulled by white Brahma bulls."

The main protagonist, Lillian, is a continuation of a small character found near the end of her previous work. She now travels to forget, she travels for the chance to lose her history in the warmth of a different place. I found the journey just as invigorating, forgetting my own past and returning in a moment of self-reflection that which spilled from Lillian into myself in the same way that Nin's descriptions spilled over to make the hot weight of wet air and sun on my skin. The reflections of people I have known echoed through the pages.

"Archeologists of the soul never return empty handed."

[Cassidy Brinn]

It was the year when everyone's attention was focussed on the moon. "The first terrestrial body to be explored will undoubtedly be the moon." Yet how little we know about human beings, thought Lillian. All the telescopes are focused on the distant. No one is willing to turn his vision inward.

Nin turns her vision inward to recreate, as an object of analysis, a human being. Lillian is not a character in any dramatic sense. She is a case. Her arrival in Golconda, her time there, and her journey home are not told like a story. They are explained. Nin's style is the bluntest rejection of "Show, don't tell" I've ever read. It doesn't engross you, or make you lose yourself in empathy, or carry you along the narrative.

There is no narrative flow, but there is lots of water in Golconda. The first images of the city are all drenched.

Foliage:

The green of the foliage was not like any other greens: it was deeper, lacquered, and moist. The leaves were heavier, fuller, the flowers bigger. They seem surcharged with sap...

The ocean at the foot of the dramatically perched pleasure hotel, the Black Pearl:

The hotel was at the top of the hill, one main building and a cluster of small cottages hidden by olive trees and cactus. It faced the sea at a place where huge boiling waves were trapped by crevices in the rocks and struck at their prison with cannon reverberations. Two narrow gorges were each time assaulted, the waves sending foam high in the air and leaping up as if in a fury at being restrained.

Paddling with the Doctor through the lagoon, in the moment just before gunshots:

Her hand, which she had left in the waters of the lagoon to feel the gliding, the uninterrupted gentleness of the flowing, to assure herself of this union with a living current, she now felt she must lift, to prove to the Doctor that she shared his anxiety, and that his sadness affected her. She must surrender the pleasure of touching the flow of water as if she were touching the flow of life within her, out of sympathy for his anguish.

But that's just the tension, it turns out. Lillian is surrounded by water but cannot join the flow. The Doctor diagnoses her their first night together: her past has followed her, she will gravitate towards copies of the people and the problems she tried to leave behind. We don't find out what her secret burden is until she's sitting on the plane returning to New York.

On the journey homeward, she starts to reflect on "her incompletely drowned marriage." We'd never heard anything about a husband, but after the Doctor died, she "swung between the drug of forgetfulness and the drug of awareness" and by the time she boards the plane, awareness has won out. All Lillian's experiences in Golconda are reframed as a farce of freedom. She left her husband Larry, but in his absence recreated him. She had been the lively one, and he withdrawn, caring only to care for her. Away from him, she incarnated him, got quiet and distant. "Her courage, her flow in life had only existed in relation to Larry, by comparison with his withdrawals." She became possessed by him.

Caught by the notion of possession, her mind wanders away from her husband, back to the Doctor, to the erotic consequences of being spanked by her father as a child, and settles into replaying and analyzing a past love affair in Paris. (I think Jay the painter and Sabina the model and Djuna the wise friend may have been introduced in one of the earlier four volumes of the "continuous novel" of which this is the fifth, final installment.) Lillian had no history at all during her time in Golconda, outside a few recollections of her girlhood in Mexico and a pang when another man's children at the Black Pearl sense the "groove for children, already formed," and play her missing children as she plays their missing mother. As she flies home, her memories come flooding in. The final swerve of their twisting current goes back to her husband, as she reads about the moon and finds in every detail a symbol of their marriage. The final image is of celestial motherhood:

"In silence, in mystery, a human being was formed, was exploded, was struck by other passing bodies, was burned, was deserted. And then it was born in the molten love of the one who cared."

In Golconda, Lillian seems merry, dreamy, sometimes impulsive, sometimes aloof. She watches the drama, but only gets involved once, when she is tricked into paying money to free a sham prisoner. The rush of memories as she flies home introduces a totally new character, or rather several, Larry's wife, Jay's lover, Sabina's lover, Djuna's protégé. She suddenly tumbles over with identity, a scramble of details that hardly all seem to belong to one person. It works as unexpected realism, a reminder that people's identities are more jumbled into competing narratives then one story usually allows for. There's space for more true-to-life incoherence here because Nin's style is episodic, not linear. Moments burst like fireworks, and people are created anew with each blast.

Nin uses fiction to stitch up fractured experiences with the thread not of narrative, but of analysis. Lillian is not individuated in the typical style, as a collection of mannerisms and consistent intentions. Her character emerges in the description of a formative childhood experience, or speculation on what she was really trying to free in herself when she paid to free the sham prisoner. For Nin, characterization is investigation. And as investigation is a sputtering business, prone to bursts of insight and correction, so too Lillian is drawn and redrawn throughout the seduction.

According to the 1969 Afterword (which I'm not sure is totally reliable as it seems seeped in acid and drops too many names), in Jung's theory of individuation, "there comes the moment, crucial, heightened with archetypical significance, of the meeting with the minotaur of one's own self."

The quote from the Talmud that Nin helped popularize speaks of projection:

Lillian was reminded of the Talmudic words: "We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are."

The title doesn't suggest Lillian will use her newfound knowledge to rid herself of misconceptions and see into the true nature of things. Instead, if the Afterword's right, Lillian's story is of the seduction of the self. The title leaves it unclear whether the minotaur is passive or active in the seduction, but if it's seducing itself, then it's both. So Lillian's self-analysis is a self-seduction; her self-knowledge is masturbation.

A singer was chanting the Mexican plainsong, a lamentation on the woes of passion. Tequila ran freely, sharpened by lemon and salt on the tongue. The voices grew husky and the figures blurred. The naked feet trampled the dirt, and the bodies lost their identities and flowed into a single dance, moved by one beat. The heat from the bowels of the earth warmed their feet.

Doctor Hernandez frowned and said: "Lillian, put your sandals on!"

In her introspection, Lillian kicks off her sandals and dances. Her story passes like a song without beginning or end, a drum beat carried over by the wind and following its own rhythm until it's overpowered again by the sea.

[Leonard Klossner · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Some voyages have their inception in the blueprint of a dream, some in the urgency of contradicting a dream. Lillian’s recurrent dream of a ship that could not reach the water, that sailed laboriously, pushed by her with great effort, through city streets, had determined her course toward the sea, as if she would give this ship, once and for all, its proper sea bed."

It's been a while since I've last read Anais Nin. It's hard to find her lesser-known "continuous" novels in bookstores, as evidenced by the two years it's been since I've read anything I haven't yet read by her.

But God, I forgot how in love with Nin I fell some five or six years ago when I first read A Spy In the House of Love and House of Incest. I read her erotica first for some reason, and even the material in Delta of Venus and Little Birds was not without it's psychologically penetrating style. Nin championed literature as a means of psychoanalysis, and this is as evident in this book as it has always been (besides receiving psychoanalysis for some time, she and Henry Miller practiced as psychoanalysts for a brief period).

Anais Nin was definitely a huge influence on my writing when I first started writing seriously some six years ago, moving me to keep one critical eye trained inward. Reading through Seductions reminded me of how powerful of an influence she was back then with its intense focus on the "cities of the interior" as she called it.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally I prefer her surrealist works (or sections of her journals) but this narrative tale really got under my skin. Unfortunately the end really drops in quality. The last third of the book is mostly the character (actually Nin herself, only half disguising the real figures in her life she is speaking of) analyzing her marriage and affairs in light of the what she has just experienced in the first part of the book and it just doesn't work as well as the earlier sections. The summary of her affair with Jay and Sabina (a barely disguised Henry and June Miller) seems so unnecessary, and the long rambling analysis of her marriage to "Larry" is a bit tedious. The first two thirds of the book is absolutely magical and I prefer to cling to that part.

[miss G · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was one of those books that I found myself identifying with the writer and largely relating to the book as a craft rather than getting pulled into the imagery and losing myself in the story. While miss Nin definitely has the gift of language and the ability to move you with her words and immerse you in the world she creates, this is much more evident in her diaries for me than in this story. This book felt forced. It seemed that she was trying so hard to make the psychological points that the flow of the story suffered. There were times that I was fully in the world of Golconda, but overall my reading of this book was clinical.

[Rowena · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seduction of a Minotaur has some beautiful insights set sporadically throughout the text, though I found the book as a whole quite labourious. I am much more a fan of Nin's diary writing and short erotic stories than this.

I had to push myself to complete this book, though in it's defence it may have been a much better read in context to the other books in the series...

[faby · Rating 1 out of 5]

Love the cast of characters because each is varied, and they all add to a different aspect of the story. I’ve read one Anais Nïn book before — A Spy in the House of Love — and it very much was a contained story with really only two main characters, and a cast of men that served to help explore the narrator’s psychosexual journey, so it was great to be able to see what Nïn’s wider character work looked like. Everyone was entertaining, like the perfect, mismatches guests of a soirée.

The descriptions also cannot go unmentioned. She’s masterful in this, and her command of language and sensuous narration is always beautiful.

Finally, but certainly not least, what the hell was up with all the orientalism! It hits you as soon as you pick up the book, smack-dab on the first page, like the author wants to impress upon you how much she loves Golconda and Mexico and its people, and yet it seems like she lived in an era (she did) before Edward Said published “Orientalism” and finally gave a name for the strange ways that white people, and particularly Europeans, view the rest of the world. I nearly gave up on the book as soon as I began because of it, but pushed through because, despite her shortcomings, Nïn’s storytelling sucks you in from the get-go.

Other notes:

A story that explores how people sometimes move elsewhere to escape their pasts, and yet they cannot escape where they come from — “America alone could cure him of malaria, America-the-mother, America-the-father had been transported into the supplies shed, canned and bottled.”

The last 50 pages of the book are the best bits of the story because Nïn explores what she knows to do so well — the psychosexual aspects of the characters. Really, the entire book feels like exposition for these last 50 pages where Nïn dives deeply into the psyche of our main character, Lillian, and her marital problems and the reasons why she had come to Golconda in the first place. Unfortunately, it feels like too little too late.

Really loved as well the re-introduction of Sabina (from her previous novel, A Spy In The House of Love) as well because of how she and Lillian related to each other and acted as one another’s foils.

[Sarah Ahmad · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a spectacular conclusion to the Cities of The Interior series. Throughout the course of the series, as the women of the series detach from their male counterparts and infatuations, they begin to find themselves. During a time when women very much see themselves as an extension of or pertaining to man, this book was revolutionary in the revelation that women themselves play a unique role in the universe, and the searching for self in this book was powerful and poetic. Nin is an incredible writer, and I am so happy to have read this book. Nin explores the fluidity of gender and sexuality in such an amorphous and beautiful way, and in this last book especially, I liked the respect with which Nin captures Mexico, in direct contrast to the rigidity and nuclearity of the Occident. Here is my favorite quote: "Out of the full beauty of the tropical night, the full moon, the full bloom of the stars, the full velvet of the night, a full woman might be born. No more scattered fragments of herself living separate cellular lives, living at times in the temporary homes of others' lives."

[d9 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I rated this book a 4/5 only because I’m tired of Anaïs romanticizing the “savage” locals of every place on earth. While I don’t believe her to be racist, this stereotype feels insensitive to a contemporary reader. Though she is undeniably a feminist figure, she often falls into the patriarchal trap of comparing herself to other women, as she does here. Sometimes, this results in beautiful tributes to the beauty and majesty of women, but at other times (especially in her diaries), it becomes unbearable to read.

Nonetheless, I’ve always preferred her fiction to her diaries, and I feel this is one of her best works. A true surrealist poet, Anaïs transforms her prose into a hypnotic text that leaves one entranced, as if under a spell. Her mastery of language is often overlooked, and this exploration of becoming oneself in the aftermath of a traumatic childhood stands as a testament to her brilliance as a writer.

[Peter Sandwall · Rating 4 out of 5]

"You will never rest until you have discovered the familiar within the unfamiliar. You will go around as these tourists do, searching for flavors which remind you of home, begging for Coca-Cola instead of tequila, cereal foods instead of papaya. Then the drug will wear off. You will discover that barring a few divergences in skin tone, or mores, or language, you are still related to the same kind of person because it all comes from within you, you are the one fabricating the web."

[Jim Wheeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many Sides of Life

To be confronted with the present encapsulated in the past, confronted with a search for meaning, and finally made aware of yourself searching for a sense of wholeness takes one out of the mundane and moves into the future. This is a good procession. One that creates a new possibility.

[Simon Bate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lillian is a pianist who gets a three month residency in Mexico however the book contains nothing about her playing and basically nothing about music.Lillian is more obsessed with meditating on and analysing her relationships with her husband and her ex-lovers which she does in a sort of discontinous narrative.

[Anita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Muuchhhh to think ab !! We r fated to repeat the same toxic cycles until we attain self knowledge, which requires us to realise that everything around us is a reflection of ourselves (“we do not see things as they are, we see them as we are”)… however a lot of paternalistic colonialism in this book which was hard to read but ! the rest was beautiful

[Chris Craddock · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wasn't thrilled with her prose style but it was unique and very different from the norm. Magical surrealism?

[Sarah Van de kamp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, soft, internal. I love this book because it takes me into "the interior" and what a beautiful, soul-soaking place it is.

[saraswati · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loving the way she aligns the words, but certainly sure that she tries too hard in crafting the psychological points of this book.

[Simona Perosce · Rating 1 out of 5]

Abbandonato. Lo trovo confuso e noioso.

[Aaron Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thoughtful but dull.

[Maja · Rating 2 out of 5]

"What took place that night was not love of woman. It was a hope of an exchange of selves."

[Martins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ella em fascina. Aquest llibre no tant. Però sisplau llegiu els seus dietaris ✨