Seduction of the Minotaur

The novel completes a long transit. The sequence began in the dark interiors of Paris — studios, cafés, a barge on the Seine — and ends in saturating tropical light, but the real reversal is in the direction of travel: the earlier books watched women flee inward from the world, and this one watches Lillian discover that the flight itself was the labyrinth. The Minotaur of the title waits at the center of no maze but her own.

Nin built Golconda from her Mexican travels — Acapulco above all, which the diary records with delight — and grew the novel out of her 1958 self-published Solar Barque once Alan Swallow began issuing her books properly. The expansion deepened Dr. Hernandez into the sequence's last important character: the healer who cannot heal himself, and whose fate gives the sunny book its shadow. The novel also carries the sequence's most quoted sentence — 'we do not see things as they are, we see them as we are' — Nin's borrowing of an old Talmudic observation, set like a keystone into Lillian's story.

Lillian, the pianist whose force always braced against expected loss, takes a season's engagement in Golconda. The city works on her like a solvent: sun, drums, a populace unembarrassed by the body, days without the arithmetic of anxiety. She moves through the expatriate colony — each member carrying an unhappiness carefully packed at home — and through the lives of the locals, guided by Dr. Hernandez, the port's physician, who treats symptoms as confessions and reads Lillian's ease as the most interesting symptom of all.

What surfaces, in the heat, is everything Lillian left running at home: the marriage to Larry she fled without leaving, the children, the self she has been performing force for since girlhood. The novel converts its travelogue into an excavation — the labyrinth image turning slowly from Golconda's streets to Lillian's own interior — and the question stops being where she has arrived and becomes what she will do with what the light has shown her.