Djuna Barnes
Paperback | Pages: 182 pages Rating: 3.66 | 8803 Users | 885 Reviews
Mention Books In Favor Of Nightwood
| Original Title: | Nightwood |
| ISBN: | 0811216713 (ISBN13: 9780811216715) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Description Conducive To Books Nightwood
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (TLS). 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 person—a 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.Specify Appertaining To Books Nightwood
| Title | : | Nightwood |
| Author | : | Djuna Barnes |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 182 pages |
| Published | : | September 26th 2006 by New Directions (first published 1936) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Classics. LGBT. GLBT. Queer. Novels |
Rating Appertaining To Books Nightwood
Ratings: 3.66 From 8803 Users | 885 ReviewsCommentary Appertaining To Books Nightwood
Nightwood is the sound of hearts breaking, written on the page, spread out for all to see, five lives, five people eviscerated and eviscerating each other. These people fucking kill me, they are so sad and so full of nonsense and so determined to live in their own personal little boxes, striving for epiphanies that they barely even understand, trying to be a certain idea of What a Person Is. Is that what I'm like? Maybe that's what everyone is like. Barnes lays out these characters' lives likeT.S. Elliot said of Nightwood, that it was "so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it". It's really more like a poetic dream than it is a novel. This isn't really because there is no narrative to be found, there is, and what's more, there is a clearly defined romantic conflict between the two main female characters, Nora Flood and Robin Vote. What makes it poetic is probably the flowery digressions that follow the brief explanations of what is happening
I'm evidently just not brilliantly smart enough to enjoy this book as I couldn't see the point of it at all. In a way it reminded me of Shakespeare, extemporising on themes of love, sexual jealousy and personality in flights of poetry. But remember why Shakespeare is a little bit obscure and difficult, because we hear it through the long shadows of the centuries; a couple more, I read, and we'll have to translate it, like Chaucer. Nightwood is dense and difficult at eighty, presumably because it
I enjoyed the style and originality of Nightwood, but didn't love it, for two reasons. The first is that it is very much of its time. The novel feels like a push-back, a response to the status-quo, an attempt to embody some form of modernity. I felt I lacked context; I found it difficult to meaningfully relate to this narrow, obsolete zeitgeist. The second reason, is that I could not connect deeply enough to the characters - especially to the three women - to feel involved in their minds and the
I am a fan of experimental literature since first experiencing the fun rides I got from Postmodernist novels of Barth, Vonnegut, and Pynchon in my college days in the early 70s. I recently set out to give myself a dose of ten radical novels ranging from Woolfs first exploration of Modernist forms in The Voyage Out (1915) to a recent example of the new weird, Nell Zinks The Wallcreeper (2014). Among the set I chose, the most challenging to read and digest in my soul was the one on my plate here.
You know what man really desires? inquired the doctor, grinning into the immobile face of the Baron. One of two things: to find someone who is so stupid that he can lie to her, or to love someone so much that she can lie to him. Baron Felix is a man of pretenses. He is not really a baron at all, but his father had perpetrated the deception his whole life so Felixs filial legacy is to carry on the social duplicity. He kept a valet and a cook; the one because he looked like Louis the Fourteenth
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