Children of the Albatross

The second installment of the continuous novel is the one where Nin's method is purest: almost nothing happens that a synopsis can hold, and everything happens in the shifts of trust between people. Djuna, glimpsed in Ladders to Fire as Lillian's confidante, gets her past here — the orphanage, the dancing school, the early lesson that watchfulness is safer than wanting — and a present built to protect it.

The novel's young men, especially Paul, live under fathers whose authority has curdled into weather, and Djuna's rooms become their refuge. Nin drew the material from her own circle of the thirties and its dancers and sons; the café of the second half is recognizably the Paris café of her diary, the institution that let a scattered cast keep finding itself at the same tables.

'The Sealed Room' is Djuna's interior. Raised in an orphanage and schooled as a dancer, she has built an adult life that admits danger only in curated doses, and the young men she gathers — Michael, who cannot love women; Paul, seventeen and half-escaped from a tyrannical father — offer intimacy without the full weight of a grown man's claim. With Paul the arrangement tips toward something realer, and the novel's tension is whether Djuna will let it: the sealed room is her own making, and only she can unmake it.

'The Café' widens the frame. At the tables where the quarter's artists sit, the sequence's cast reassembles — Lillian back from her own defeats, Jay holding court, Sabina passing through like weather — and Djuna moves among them as the one who sees each clearly. The section works like the party that closed Ladders to Fire: less an ending than a regrouping, the players repositioned for the books still to come.