Review: The Four-Chambered Heart

The Four-Chambered Heart

by Anaïs Nin

July 21, 2011 was a wicked hot day here in Ohio. Temperatures reached nearly 100 degrees, with a heat index well over the hundred mark. And with no air conditioning in my apartment, the thermometer was registering in the mid-90s. The only way to avoid Death by Hot was to take Anaïs with me to the local diner for a couple hours.

And that was exactly the perfect atmosphere for reading this book. Suddenly, I was 20-something years old again, sitting in Frisch's, eating piles of French fries, drinking gallons of coffee, and falling in love with Anaïs and her diaries. Present day, it was iced tea & salad and "The Four-Chambered Heart," but the feeling was the same.

ABOUT THE BOOK
"The Four-Chambered Heart" is a semi-autobiographical novel about a woman named Djuna and her affair with Rango. It is the third book in the five-volume Cities of the Interior sequence.

MY THOUGHTS
I really didn't understand why Djuna was in a relationship with Rango. He's selfish and lazy and jealous. And he has a wife who is a crazy hypochondriac, who knows about the affair and supposedly approves but still acts like a jealous manipulative shrew.

But this question of why we love who we love is what the author is exploring in this book. "We love shadows of our hidden selves in others." She also explores the question of whether we can - or should - love with our whole heart, or if the heart is "four-chambered" for divided love and loyalties.

This book is very much philosophy-driven. There is not much plot and not a great deal of character development. Nin uses the loosely drafted story as a framework for musings about the meaning of love. Though the book lacks in literary strength, the prose is evocative and lyrical.

"The drug of love was no escape, for in its coils lie latent dreams of greatness which awaken when men and women fecundate each other deeply. Something is always born of man and woman lying together and exchanging the essence of their lives. Some seed is always carried and opened in the soil of passion. The fumes of desire are the womb of man's birth and often in the drunkenness of caresses history is made, and science, and philosophy."

RATING
I did enjoy the book, though not nearly so much as Nin's diaries or Collages.

I read this book for the Paris In July blog event.