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Editorial Review Amazon.com
Nightwood is not only a classic of lesbian literature, but was also acknowledged by no less than T. S. Eliot as one of the great novels of the 20th century. Eliot admired Djuna Barnes' rich, evocative language. Lesbian readers will admire the exquisite craftsmanship and Barnes' penetrating insights into obsessive passion. Barnes told a friend that Nightwood was written with her own blood "while it was still running." That flowing wound was the breakup of an eight-year relationship with the lesbian love of her life.Book Description
The fiery and enigmatic masterpiece—one of the greatest novels of the Modernist era.
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. ... Read more Customer Reviews (21) 
Angels on all-fours and other night creatures...
*Nightwood* is a novel composed in poetic prose, as T.S. Eliot asserts in his preface, the kind of writing that "demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give." Most novels are not composed at such white-hot intensity, at a level of personal emergency such as Djuna Barnes has conveyed in *Nightwood.* This is a book that doesn't let you rest for a moment, the rare sort of novel that is all conflict and climax. It's a work that you don't doubt was torn living from the author's very being, less a "novel" per se, than an organic and all-but-impossible to dissect whole that loses more the more you attempt to analyze it.
What Barnes records in *Nightwood* is the experiential agony, as opposed to merely the "story," of a love-lost. Robin Vote is a Sapphic femme fatal, an androgynous, alcoholic, nymphomaniac enigma who is beloved, successively, by three different characters, who she subsequently leaves an emotional wreck. Nora Flood, who stands in for the author, is the narrative center of *Nightwood* and the woman around whom the others orbit, with Robin, like a doomsday asteroid, orbiting them all. It is Nora who struggles and suffers and indeed understands Robin better than anyone, even if that only means understanding better the tragedy inherent in knowing her at all. Her utter despair at losing Robin is stunningly captured by Barnes who, it is said, based *Nightwood* closely on a real-life love catastrophe from which she never recovered. One can believe it reading *Nightwood.* A good deal of the novel's intensity comes from its unquestionable authenticity. In Robin Vote, Barnes has created the personification of the unsolvable mystery of every beloved who, as if by destiny, eludes, indeed must elude, our grasp.
Much is made--and rightly so--of *Nightwood's* most famous character, Dr. Matthew O'Connor, an impoverished, drunken, charlatan with dubious medical credentials and a penchant for cross-dressing. A good deal of the novel is devoted to O'Connor's rambling monologues which vibrate between madness, comedy, and transcendent wisdom...sometimes all three together. But the transgendered O'Connor is only the most flamboyantly unconventional of *Nightwood's* inhabitants. All of Barnes's characters are misfits and outsiders, sexually and/or socially; interestingly it is the very displacement they feel within their own time and place that most enables the contemporary reader to sympathize with them. The sense of being out-of-step is, perhaps, timeless. But it's more than mere sexual and social deviance that connect the contemporary reader to these characters--it's a sense of the secret life of us all, the inherent "deviance" of our private lives from the "normal" daylight existence of moderated emotions, rational desires, and objective viewpoints we all pretend to share. "Nightwood" is the country we inhabit when the sun goes down, "society" dissolves, and the inexplicable, uncontrollable, and irrational in us emerges.
I found the first chapter of *Nightwood* dull and dated and almost considered putting the book down. Don't do it. Hang in there until the second chapter...if Barnes doesn't catch your attention at that point, chances are she won't. This is a challenging text, elusively and elliptically written, ejaculatory, jumping from peak to peak, a shout from the soul of despair, a cry from the dark night. The characters don't so much interact with each other, but, as in real life, they are merely declaiming to themselves, using the declamations of others as cues to their own speeches. They affect, deflect, and "aggravate" each other in a sort of vacuum, forcing them to even greater degrees of solitude and despair.And yet, through all these characters, we hear one voice, one lament...the author's, ours, every lover's. As uniquely particular and personal *Nightwood* may be, as idiosyncratically composed, and as inimitable, it is nonetheless an emotional document as common and identifiably human as any kidney or pancreas.
A rare thing, a "novel" that is also a work of art -*Nightwood* is a gnomic utterance of the apocalypse of love.
Bizarre and over-rated.
This book's three main characters ("the doctor", Nora and Robin) did not hold my interest. This is the most bizarre thing I've read despite its vivid imagery and the doctor's often insightful observations. The story is one big whine about being captive to one's sexual/emotional nature and needs. Here are 2 lesbians and a transvestite fortunate enough to live in Paris, the capital of free thinking in the 1920's and a genial place that acceptedpeople with these sensibilities. Yet, Nora and the doctor never feel comfortable with themselves. The character who did touch me is a secondary one, Felix (Baron Volkbein) who, despite fabricating an aristocratic lineage to raise others' regard for him, is capable of responding with compassion to someone who needs him just for who he is.
This novel has been used in academic studies of gender matters. But it could also serve as an aid in tracking the practice of perceiving oneself as a victim when one's personal choice creates a problem. In "Nightwood", the characters are very aware that their choices are their own and they accept responsibility for them.That is decades before people began blaming the consequences of their decisions on others, before the politicization and institutionalized endorsement of victimhood as a method of transferring responsibility for one's actions onto others.
My dissatisfaction with this book stems from its slack attention to time and place. At each page, I had to remind myself that the story is set in the 1920's and not the latter half of the 1800's as I instinctively felt. Archaic phrases rich with signs of an earlier period combined with an absence of any 20th century flavour has produced characters who float in from the past and seem therefore devoid of physical mass. Similarly, Paris, the story's primary location, is reduced to an icon of itself like a backdrop assembled in haste for a play. Mentions of "rue du Cherche-Midi" and "Hotel Recamier" sound promising but lead only to the next bout of the doctor's enrapturing but ultimately meaningless rants. The best I can think about this neglect is that the author may have been demonstrating how self-obsession robs its holder of the capacity to interact with hisenvironment beyond the narrow confines of its demands. No one seems affected by where they are. In the end, this is about people who experience love as torture and a direct route to hell.
Very Disappointing
I had such high hopes going in, what with Eliot's singing praises and all sorts of reputable people claiming this book to be a lost Modernist gem, but they were dashed by actually trying to read the work. Grueling is perhaps the best word that can be used to describe the feeling that overwhelms the reader attempting to tackle this book. This quickly fades to annoyance with the realization that it is all for naught. Contrary to what Eliot says in relation to its poetic qualities, her writing is messy and unfulfilling. And the content? It was often very hard to discern what it even was(which, for me, is not an automatic strike against a book) and, even worse, was very, very dated. However, there were some moments when, as another reviewer has noted, Barnes will have a single sentence or phrase that makes one's heart skip a beat, but these are few and far between. And, as one last note, before actually reading this book, I disregarded many of its negative reviews as being indicative of laziness or incompetence on the other reviewers' parts in relation to my superior reading skills, but now, I must abashedly say, that this is just not a very good book.
The Night Is A Hunter
Djuna Barnes' short modernist novel Nightwood (1936) is one of the genuine odd ducks of 20th century literature.Written in an uneven, semi - comic, and baroque style, the book is more likely to impress young readers rather than older and more experienced individuals who have lost their appetite for decadent romantic entanglements.Nightwood is certainly an original work, and Barnes' vision of the factors shaping human destiny - especially time, heritage, and evolution - are uniquely expressed.But despite its fluidity of language, many of Barnes' seemingly brilliant observations concerning life, consciousness, and human suffering are more specious than acute, which is important, since Barnes' emotionally marooned cast is badly in need of answers, wisdom, and salvation.
Hiding under the text's antique lathering is a sparse, skeletal plot, one top heavy with philosophical speculations but reflecting little grasp of basic psychological truths about human nature.Nora Flood meets and falls destructively in love with passive - aggressive Robin Vote, a strange, corpse - eyed, and inexplicably charismatic woman who, despite marriage and motherhood, is spiritually, psychologically, and emotionally adrift in the world. When their affair evolves into a love triangle, Nora turns increasingly for advice to charlatan doctor and Greek chorus Matthew O'Connor, a poverty - stricken alcoholic who is pleasurably inclined towards homosexuality, transvestitism, and self - demoralization ("I'm a lady in no need of insults," "I was born as ugly as God dare premeditate"). Significantly, all of the book's characters are in some way stunted, crippled, or pathologically predisposed.
Barnes excels at dramatizing the failure of romantic love, especially the kind that displays active neurotic factors, elements of codependence, and spontaneous psychological transference.Those pages which detail Nora's isolation and sad obsession with her abandoning lover are deeply felt, haunting, and moving indeed.
In "The Squatter," Barnes spends an entire chapter fulfilling a personal vendetta by brilliantly depicting widow Jenny Petherbridge's status as a rapacious black hole and non - entity. Jenny is ugly ("she had a beaked head and the body, small, feeble, and ferocious, that somehow made one associate her with Judy," "only severed could any part of her been called "right"), stupid ("when anyone was witty about a contemporary event, she would look perplexed and a little dismayed"), incapable of establishing her own values ("Someone else's wedding ring was on her finger...the books in her library were other people's selections...her walls, her cupboards, her bureaux, were teeming with second - hand dealings with life...the words that fell from her mouth seemed to have been lent to her"), spiritually empty but power hungry ("she wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing"), and lacks poise, maturity, and dignity ("being one of those panicky little women, who, no matter what they put on, look like a child under penance," or, as O'Connor calls her, "a decaying comedy jester, the face on a fool's -stick, and with the smell about her of mouse - nests"). Barnes makes an excellent case for the argument that it is not the powerful that are to be feared, but the weak, frustrated, and incapable.
Robin the "somnambulist" is also lengthily described, largely via the use of symbols and metaphors: throughout the text, the boyish, bird - named Robin is described in animal, vegetable, and mineral terms.When first encountered, Robin, who is later recognized as a kindred spirit by a wild circus animal and a ferocious dog, is found lying unconscious in a small apartment crowded with a superabundance of plant life.Barnes describes Robin's abode as "a jungle trapped in a drawing room" and Robin as the "ration of the carnivorous flowers."
The flamboyant, limp - wristed ("his hands...he always carried like a dog who is walking on his hind legs"), dirty - kneed, rhetoric - spewing Dr. Matthew O'Connor, the book's most famous character, is a figure of high camp whom today's readers are more likely to find mildly distasteful rather than shocking. O'Connor is given an entire long chapter in which to pontificate ("Watchman, What Of The Night?"), though the chapter reflects badly on the wounded Nora, whose continuous exclamations of "But what am I to do?" and "What will become of her?" and "How will I stand it?" reduce her from the genuinely tormented human being of earlier chapters to a one - dimensional cartoon damsel in distress.
Intelligent, perceptive readers are likely to find one passage in every five that sounds profound and poetically illuminating like the others, but means absolutely nothing on careful examination (for example: "Your body is coming to it, your are forty and the body has a politic too, and a life of its own that you like to think is yours. I heard a spirit new once, but I knew it was a mystery eternally moving outward and on, and not my own.")Despite Barnes' often incredible use of language, the ultimate effect of Nightwood is one of shallowness, slickness, and almost hysterical distance from its own primary sources. When compared to other literary books written by women also primarily focused on women, such as the five novels of Jean Rhys or Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat, Nightwood seems sketchy, brittle, and, as one critic said about Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, seemingly more concerned with mystification than with genuine mystery. Though bold and intrepid as a beautiful young big city journalist, and later as an expatriate modernist writer living among the Parisian glitterati, Barnes closed the door on the rest of the world in very early middle age, and became a notorious New York City recluse known primarily for bitterness and explosive outbursts of anger.Readers of Nightwood, with its essential focus on theoretical, airy philosophy rather than psychological home truths, may find clues as to how Barnes's life went sorrowfully wrong.
An elegant classic
There are few books that can be safely called classics--and out of those, fewer are as deserving of the term as Djuna Barnes' 'Nightwood'. Elegant and mesmerizing, difficult and beautiful, it is a measured and balanced work of art.
Another reviewer said this wasn't a 'celebration of lesbian love'--this much is true. What makes this book truly remarkable is that it *doesn't* set any boundaries--hearts are fickle, hearts are cruel, and every character in the novel is inflicted with his/her own brand of emotional anxiety. Barnes makes no distinction between 'lesbian' love and any other--it is as normal, and as abnormal, as any other human affection. That alone makes this book a classic (but of course, the writing too is intoxicating). In fact, what is truly surprising (to me, at least!) is that despite her exquisite elegance, Djuna Barnes manages to take such a no-nonsense approach to human emotions. She never seeks to simplify anything--and makes her work difficult for the reader in the most rewarding of ways. (I mean that she doesn't let us get away with pre-conceptions or romantic illusions. She manages to make the imperfect reality as arresting as the myth of perfection.) Most of us, in our lives, don't *really* know what we're doing, or what we feel. Barnes makes her characters real by putting them through the same confusing maelstrom of experiences--where one emotion often morphs into another--love into indifference, respect into insecurity, and so on. There are no answers--there is only endurance--endurance of others, endurance of ourselves. I don't want to be more specific and give out details of the plot. This book has to be experienced to be believed...
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