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Loading... Nightwood (1936)by Djuna Barnes
  
» 24 more 20th Century Literature (303) Female Author (233) Female Protagonist (303) 1,001 BYMRBYD Concensus (255) 1930s (49) Short and Sweet (221) My TBR (82) No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) mlevel | Jan 22, 2024 |   ) pagemother | Apr 5, 2023 | I don’t believe you can understand this book if you‘ve never been in a love mad enough to drive you near to death. I’ve never read anything that so described the mental anguish of loving a child living through their own nightmare, where an attempt to wake them only causes a hit and a bruise to bloom upon you. Djuna and I have shared a fiery, destructive and consuming love for something strange that has forgotten us. —— Can't really tell you what I read, but it was beautiful. (Definitely will have to reread; this is probably the hardest novel I've ever read and I need a 2-day nap if we're speaking honestly here. Would recommend regardless—it was one hazy fever dream to the next and I can't complain.) (  )1  Eavans | Feb 17, 2023 | )2 quondame | May 12, 2022 |  ) edwinbcn | Dec 18, 2021 |
...the real achievement–and where I found most of my enjoyment–is in Barnes’ phenomenal and inimitable use of language. While reading Nightwood, I thought often of Slate critic Meghan O’Rourke’s line in her case for difficult books: “Reviewers sometimes don’t tell readers what to expect or explain that a book’s primary pleasure is linguistic rather than narrative…” What I loved about Nightwood–what really had me inking up the margins–was Barnes’ powerful ideas and unusual word combinations. ...the wonder of Nightwood is not only stylistic. It lies in the range and depth of feeling the words convey. There is irony here and humor, too, but in the end, the novel is a hymn to the dispossessed, the misbegotten and those who love too much. At one time or another, I suspect that those adjectives describe most of us.  Nightwood is itself. It is its own created world, exotic and strange, and reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined. Few authors have achieved so much celebrity with one novel as the elegant, exotic Djuna Barnes, without whom no account of Greenwich Village in the teens, or the Left Bank in the 1920's, is complete. That one novel was "Nightwood." Overwritten and self-indulgent, it carries off its flaws with splendid nonchalance. Belongs to Publisher SeriesBiblioteca Adelphi (133) Bibliothek Suhrkamp (293) suhrkamp taschenbuch (1904) Is contained inIs abridged inNotable Lists
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (Times Literary Supplement). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous. The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction—there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions. Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, "A man is another persona woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own") has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature. Most striking of all is Barnes' unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T. S. Eliot to proclaim the book "so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it." Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, Nightwood still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.52Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1900-1944LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.49)
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