Solar Barque

By the late fifties the continuous novel had gone quiet commercially, and Nin returned to the method of her forties: print it yourself, in a small edition. Solar Barque was the result — Lillian's Mexican chapter, compact enough to read in a sitting, named for the boat of the Egyptian sun god that ferries the sun through the underworld each night and back into morning.

The book's afterlife is the interesting part. When Alan Swallow took Nin on and began issuing the sequence properly, she went back into Solar Barque and grew it — new material, the character of Dr. Hernandez deepened, the psychology finished — into Seduction of the Minotaur (1961), which replaced it as the sequence's fifth book. Solar Barque survives as the sketch that shows the finished painting's first state.

Lillian takes a season's engagement playing piano at a hotel in Golconda, a tropical port Nin assembled from her Mexican travels and refused to pin to a map. The city runs on a different clock: sun, music, unhurried bodies, a populace unembarrassed by pleasure. For Lillian — whose force was always braced against some expected loss — the place works on her like a solvent, and the book follows the loosening: the members of the expatriate colony with their imported unhappiness, the local doctor who reads his patients' souls as symptoms, and Lillian's slow discovery that she has carried her real subject — herself, her marriage, her unvisited interior — into the sun with her.