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The Four-Chambered Heart continues the adventures
of Djuna, the eccentric star of the preceding novel, Children
of the Albatross.
Djuna is now mistress to Rango, a feckless Guatemalan nightclub
musician. They make their home on a leaky houseboat anchored
on the Seine which, like their relationship, looks destined
to go nowhere.
Rango’s volatile personality and bohemian outlook ensures
that the dreams that Djuna awakes in him will never come to
anything. For her part, the self-sacrificing Djuna is forced
to accomodate into her home Rango’s sickly wife Zora
to whom he is tied by a half-blind complicity in her desire
to exploit all who come within range. Naturally, Zora assiduously
cultivates her various illnesses in order to secure a stranglehold
on the two lovers.
‘Her prose is like a shaft of sunlight, a cold clear
colour that can be broken up suddenly into many prismatic
hues. Her thoughts run deep, far below the surface of ordinary
fiction, flowing with the strength of a submarine current.
Of her books, The Four-Chambered Heart is undoubtedly
the most successful’ — Irish Times
‘Exceptionally acute sensibility . . . Here, if you like,
is the commentary of a sensitive and percipient
twentieth-century Eve on the inadequacies of the eternal Adam’
— Herald Tribune
‘Poetic prose of a singular vitality and beauty . . .
explores the relationship between man and woman on a level
to which very few contemporary novelists penetrate’ —
Atlantic
ANAÏS NIN was born in Paris in 1903. Her first book was
published in the 1930s, and she went on to write stories and
a series of autobiographical novels, as well as her celebrated
volumes of erotica. Perhaps best known for her Journals,
her personal life and loves have attracted considerable attention
— partly through her association with Henry Miller and
his wife but also because for a number of years she was married
to two men at the same time, with neither finding out until
after her death in 1977. |
