Nightwood

Reading this book is like being transported to another world (usually a good sign in a novel) a world full of allusion where the reader is left grasping at smoke rings, which elegantly curl above the heads of the characters. Although the language is elegant the emotions are raw as the characters, all living in a world of pain desperately try to cope with their feelings of love and loss.

There is an excellent introduction by T S Eliot that alerts the reader to the writing style of the author, prepares him perhaps for a reading experience that will take some concentration. I found it best to approach the book in small chunks, because the writing style then becomes fresh with every read and allowed me to revel in the use of language, show more without becoming too tired or complaisant. This approach served me well for the first six chapters: the final two where the strands of the story come together in a more narrative approach I was pleased to read in one sitting.

T S Eliot says the style of the novel with its beauty of phrasing the brilliance of wit and characterisation has a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of an Elizabethan tragedy. This is Barnes describing the Squatter Jenny Petherbridge:

“She was nervous about the future, it made her indelicate. She was one of the most importantly wicked women of her time - because she could not let her time alone, and yet could never be part of it. She wanted to be the reason for everything and so she was the cause of nothing. She had the fluency of tongue and action meted out by divine providence to those who cannot think for themselves. She was master of the over-sweet phrase , the over-tight embrace”

Barnes aims to fascinate the reader, not merely by what is said, but also by the manner of saying it. There is duality and word play in the sentences in a style not unlike that of the Elizabethan author Jon Lyly, but like Lyly’s writing the style can be more important than the content and so the reader is left with decisions to be made about what he has just read and what has just been said. It does not always work because at times it feels like a scatter-gun approach, and it can be waring. However there is much in the writing that made me stop and think at how thoughtful, original and appropriate a phrase or sentence was in the context of the novel.

Djuna Barnes was an American artist, illustrator, journalist and writer Nightwood published in 1936 is considered a cult classic of lesbian fiction. She spent two decades in Europe and her novel has a distinctly European feel, with its old world sophistication and her use of German, French and Italian phrases: much of it is set in Paris between the two world wars. The story is basically about a lesbian menage-a-trois relationship with the pains and guilt of love being laid at the door of a male Doctor who advises while getting caught up with the emotions and struggling with his own catholicism. The Doctor is an Irishman who is not a qualified practitioner and leads an alcohol fused existence on the edge of polite society. The events in the novel centre on a couple of incidents that define the nature of the relationships and lead to thoughts and conversations that reflect on love, pain and death. The book has an intense feeling of melancholy leading to despair and is shot through with observations that may not be life changing, but may make you think about living - warning the style can be infectious. It is a book that will go back onto my shelves for an occasional partial re-read and so 4 stars. show less

A landmark work in lesbian literature and certainly the work of a highly intelligent woman, but for my taste, far too dense in its prose, with long meandering sentences making up paragraphs and modernist techniques that made it a battle to get through. The references and gist of the points Barnes expands on about her characters (telling instead of showing) often seem tedious or just escaped me. Maybe I’m just getting too old, but for whatever reason, this didn’t resonate with me, and I just didn’t see the elegance of poetry in the work, as T.S. Eliot did.

So incredibly good & wholly conceived & astoundingly executed that to give it merely 5 stars is an insult. One could spend an entire review on the genius of the title Nightwood, evocative as it is of nightshades (poisonous plants identifiable by their seductive rich red or black berries); evocative as it is of those things we draw at night that keep darkness where we want it, whether it be in or out. It is especially fitting for a novel peopled predominately by homo- & trans-sexual characters existing in the caesura between the First and Second World Wars. The socially marginalized experience the precarity of peace twice over: even in peacetime they can only exist as as themselves, in the shadows, under the cover of night; they are show more never without anxiety and therefore never without peace.

Djuna Barnes does not belabor (and by belaboring estrange) queerness, if anything she presents--in 1937--extraordinarily precise psychological portraits of what would be quite ordinary love, if only that love were not complicated by its cultural forbiddenness.
Nightwood is the story the irresistible & fickle Robin Vote, and the tornadic havoc she wreaks on those lovers (male and female) who enter her orbit. Her story is largely interpolated by “Doctor” Matthew O’Connor, a transexual woman, who finds himself in the role of accidental pseudo-psychoanalyst to all of Robin’s forsaken lovers. (Being faithful here to Barnes’ pronoun slippage). In a deeper sense however, Nightwood is an homage to O’Connor, how he has navigated the “nightwood,” how he has helped others to do the same, how exhausting & underappreciated his task, and how wisdom cannot suffice as a substitute of loneliness.

No review can do this book justice, you simply must read it. Every sentence describes its own small universe. Don’t be intimidated by its reputation as a difficult modernist masterpiece. You’ll get it, and if you don’t, it will keep rewarding you on each re-reading. show less

Much of the language of Nightwood is impenetrable burl, root to branch, which curls around the subject in hints and suggestions but rarely points. Aside from the occasional thorns. We enter and perhaps exit a labyrinth of obsessions often erotic and all unsatisfied and leave the characters self-crucified there.

For such a short book, ‘Nightwood’ took me a while to read, as it is only palatable in small portions. I was initially inclined to give it two stars for being bafflingly experimental in a fashion that wasn’t really to my taste. Then I read the detailed introduction, summarising the history behind the book and making it clear that Djuna Barnes friends and prospective publishers made all the same comments that I was inclined to! ('...a pity that the book succeeds only in being a rambling, obscure, complicated account of what the average reader will consider God only knows', for example.) This background to the book was fascinating, which deserves another star. As a novel, it hasn’t much in the way of plot but reads like a series show more of dialogues, which contain long monologues from a drunk, bitter, gay Doctor. I felt like I would have appreciated it more if I was better informed about queer history in the 1930s. Even so, I think I would still have been slightly dubious about this sort of thing,

’”Um,” murmured the doctor, “beat life like a dinner bell, yet there is one hour that won’t ring - the hour of disentanglement. Oh well,” he sighed, “every man dies finally of that poison known as the-heart-in-the-mouth. Yours is in your hand. Put it back. The eater of it will get a taste for you; in the end his muzzle will be heard barking among your ribs. I’m not exception, God knows, I’m the last of my line, the fine hairline of least resistance.”’

Barnes has a strikingly original writing style, it just doesn't really catch my fancy. Still, although this style is nearly as indigestible that of [b:Journey to the End of the Night|12395|Journey to the End of the Night|Louis-Ferdinand Céline|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1462934409s/12395.jpg|1551463], it has two great advantages over that epic struggle of a novel: a) much shorter, thanks apparently to the intervention of Emily Coleman, Barnes’ friend, and b) not misogynistic. show less

4.999...9/5

It is wise of me to mention that from here on out, I have no idea what I'm talking about. Which, admittedly, is the usual truth of the matter concerning these reviews, but this book in particular makes me give a damn about how much knowledge did not or has not yet trickled down and damned up in my mind. Not enough to get mad over, or perhaps rather not the right type. No, this is a shaft of light breaking into countless beams that my eye has populated itself with multitudes in hopes of catching only a few, a strain of music too high and soft for my bumbling ears to quiver along with, all the sensory inputs that my body has not yet found the means of registering, fine-tuning, appreciating. However, it must be said that the show more evolution of the reader is far faster than that of physical form. And what does come through, despite all that, is an aurora borealis.

Books like these utterly spoil me. For example, after finishing up another section somewhere in the middle, I attempted to read through summaries of future tomes that I had not yet decided to set my sights on. Horrors. The words were simply there, jettisoning their meaning this way and that without care of interpretation or context, screaming out simplicity! Get your simple definitions, your clear cut cultures of conciseness, your straight-to-the-point and no-nonsense daily dose of saying what you mean and meaning what you say! No, I said, and spent the next twenty minutes huddled over my coffee and staring at nothing in particular. I don't want boxes of commercial goods. I want to fly.

For that is the talent trapped within these pages, and if you forced me at gunpoint to encompass it with a single word, I would say metaphor. If you shot a single bullet past my head and brought the red-hot funnel agonizingly close to my forehead and demanded that I do better, I would say Pynchonian. Fortunately for all, there is no gunperson of staggering menace, and I can afford to not commit the crime that I decried early on, that of lazy linguistics. For Pynchonian is easy, easy easy easy, and more likely to get omnipresent nods of approval than any sort of comprehension.

It would be better to say that Pynchon is in fact Barnesian, although I do like the feel of Djunian better despite all calls for lexiographical order, so I will most likely stick with it until someone manages to convince me otherwise without resorting to offended spittles. I cannot stand offended spittles. Regardless, I suppose we should return to Pynchon, who if he had lived a little earlier and gone into liberal arts rather than the sciences and did some amount of experimenting, he may have come quite close to the lady of whom he is most certainly a bastard child through some sort of decrepit lineage that invested heavily in the idea of said lineage. Or rather, history, society, ideology, and the rest of that decaying mass circling around our craniums and swooping in every so often for a quick bite, shit, and piss.

The worst of it is the words that we think we know and therefore treat as fact when really, metaphor. Linguistic joy, convivence between the reality and the abstract at its finest, the very structure of our civilized existence that has fossilized meaning into packages anyone can use but not everyone can utilize. For it takes a boundless amount of seductive metaphor to draw us in and keep us there until we can come out into the sun and see that in the place of the old crumbling same old same old, there is something else. A little fragile, perhaps, a little heartbreaking in the effort it makes to grip the wisps of its self together, with all the world and its ponderous assumptions of the truth against it. But oh, so beautiful.

The monotone of sexuality, the binary of gender, and the question of love and its many, many sorrows. That's all that I will say on it, for Djuna does much, much better, and I'd rather you went and saw for yourself the wonder. Don't trust the summary. It tells the story as well as a web of diaphanous rainbow copes with bricks thrown through its core.

Djuna is the writer, the doctor is her character, and we are her audience. Djuna is the god, the doctor is her prophet, and we are at the base of Mount Sinai in defiance of the morals to be decreed and the history of persecution to come. That is a lie in respect to the culture with a true hold on the story I have made use of, but it is also a metaphor, and I use it with full respect. For we are prophesied to by the doctor from Djuna in ways strange and unfamiliar, for the meaning is too large for simple statement. Or rather, it is too small, and would be quickly overwhelmed with biases and prejudices that fuel the tragedy felt along the lines of script, amongst the pages of lines. If Djuna let it be so. But she doesn't, and so the doctor rants and raves his saving and his solutions, for everyone ill comes to him but not everyone knows the extent of their illness.

Self? Society? Yes, but no, more. Night in all its unconscious yearnings unbound in full? Day that must carry the night and keep the skeleton of it bound within its paper skin? Yes, but no. Closer. Life and all its disparate yearnings on the backs of all these unfed nights, all these costumed days? Death and the end of every need for a word to explain the life to itself, and to others?

Perhaps. Remember, I have no idea what I'm talking about. I do know, though, that I'm talking. show less

Reread January 2020

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.)