Book Review: Ladders to Fire is unlike any novel I've read. It's for readers who enjoy character-based, as opposed to plot-driven, novels. This book is all character, no plot. Little changes between first page and last. Some readers might not even call it a novel. Ladders to Fire is the first in Anais Nin's so-aptly named five-novel series, Cities of the Interior, as it explores the inner lives, conflicts, neuroses, insecurities, loves and hates of bohemians in Paris (btw, it's not erotica). Focusing on several women, it's unclear (as is so much here) whether these are separate women or if some are facets of Nin herself. The writing is heightened, intensified, at times it's almost a secret language, Nin's own private symbology: "Sabina was lost. The broken compass which inhabited her and whose wild fluctuations she had always obeyed, making for tumult and motion in place of direction, was suddenly fractured so that she no longer knew the relief of tides, ebbs and flows and dispersions." At times the writing in Ladders to Fire is modernist, a diary of ex-pats in Paris, other times it's surreal, with no sign-posts as to what's real and what's not. The people described are artists, nonconformists, free spirits, a lost generation with turbulent, histrionic lives: "Only the drunks and the insane make sense." The deep psychological studies make the characters seem almost like archetypes. The reader learns more about the characters' personas, their "headspace," than their actual biographies. If you're the kind of person who studies your friends and acquaintances you'll be right at home, and may wonder how Nin would've described you. She's insightful, she truly understands people, sees deep into their motivations, their psyches, to create her intuitive behavioral portraits. One of her characters has a "peculiar flair ... for listening to the buried child in human beings," as does Nin. She examines her characters, her women, over time, in different situations and environments. Nin makes us see that no human being is simple, each person contains a universe within. We need all our intelligence just to understand the group relationships, so we can know each other. I'm not sure Ladders to Fire could've been much longer without disintegrating, but I enjoyed the whole unique and unusual experience. Four more books to go in my journey into the Cities of the Interior. [4★]
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