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Loading... Nightwood (1936)by Djuna Barnes
  
» 23 more 20th Century Literature (302) Female Author (232) Female Protagonist (292) 1,001 BYMRBYD Concensus (249) 1930s (49) Short and Sweet (221) My TBR (82) No current Talk conversations about this book. Burn it. (  ) pagemother | Apr 5, 2023 |  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.) (  )1  Eavans | Feb 17, 2023 | 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. (  )2 quondame | May 12, 2022 | Other than as a feeble ploy to keep plugging a book in the hope of raising sales, it is no use saying that a book should not be forgotten, that it should be a modern classics. Some books are justly "the preserve of academics and students" (Introd. Winterson, p. ix). (  ) edwinbcn | Dec 18, 2021 | have just read the sensationalist trash which is "Nightwood" - all perverts, all ranting, melodramatic: "The Sex God forgot" - self-pity. 1 SylviaPlathLibrary | Oct 17, 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
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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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