Djuna Barnes

Nightwood tells the stories of the love-lives of a group of Americans and Europeans in Paris in the 1920s - an exotic, night-time underworld, eccentric, seedy and beautiful. One of the earliest novels to explicitly portray homosexuality, the influence of Djuna Barnes's novel has been, and continues to be, exceptional.Nightwood is not only a classic of modernist literature, but was also acknowledged by T. S. Eliot as one of the great novels of the twentieth century.

Faber Modern Classics

Nightwood

Molly M

“Is not the gown the natural raiment of extremity? What nation, what religion, what ghost, what dream, has not worn it- infants, angels, priests, the dead; why should not the doctor, in the grave dilemma of his alchemy, wear his dress?”

Illyah E. Nilych

“Once I was remorseless, but this is another love- it goes everywhere, there is no place for it to stop - it rots me away. “


Such a strange and feverish book, dragging you headfirst through the tangle of the oddities of desire and love. Even if we love someone fully, and dangerously to the point of it consuming us, we may never truly know them and own them in turn as that love owns us.

Akanksha Chattopadhyay

this: https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...

The impassioned monologues of Doctor Dante O'Connor reveal the story of Robin Vote, a young American woman in interwar Paris, whose fate is the destruction of all who love her

Nikki Sojkowski

This was like a surrealist film on paper. It was such a weird experience and I lost so many trains of thought. Very dream-like in the vague confusing way. Pages and pages of dramatic monologues that take up only minutes plot-wise and then fast snaps jumping years into the future in a sentence.

"Nightwood, Djuna Barnes's strange and sinuous tour de force, has become a classic of modernist and lesbian literature since its first publication in 1936. Set in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna during the decadent period between the two World Wars, Nightwood "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (TLS)." "It is the story of Robin Vote and those she destroys-her husband the "Baron," their child Guido, and the two women, Nora and Jenny, who love her; the whole is illumined by the fantastic monologues of the renegade doctor Matthew O'Connor. Most striking of all is Barnes's 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," and The New York Times Book Review to assert: "Admired by Joyce, Nightwood is as important to the history of the 20th-century novel as Finnegans Wake-and more readable." --BOOK JACKET.

Brook

I loathed this book. The extremely long speeches by Matthew were right up there with the lack of plot, any likable characters, or real point. I had to read this for a book club or I would have thrown it into the garbage. I had heard good things, and I was horribly disappointed. Ugh. At least it's done.

Nightwood is not only a classic of modernist literature, but was also acknowledged by T. S. Eliot as one of the great novels of the 20th century. Eliot admired Djuna Barnes' rich, evocative language. 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 love of her life. Now recognised as a twentieth-century classic, the influence of Djuna Barnes's novel has been, and continues to be, exceptional.

erin alise 

Lina.

Sarah Sammis

Karolina Klermon-Williams

savannah eden

vive

Joshua Line

Ash(ley) Michelle C.

Jeanette Winterson

Nightwood is not only a classic of modernist literature, but was also acknowledged by T. S. Eliot as one of the great novels of the 20th century. Eliot admired Djuna Barnes' rich, evocative language. 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 love of her life.Now recognised as a twentieth-century classic, the influence of Djuna Barnes's novel has been, and continues to be, exceptional.

Nightwood Faber Modern Classics

Reviews