A review by cebolla
Ladders to Fire by Anaïs Nin

emotional reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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 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.