Published in 2006 (first published 1936)
211 pages
Djuna Barnes was an American writer known for Nightwood, a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature. She played a significant role in the development of twentieth-century English-language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and 1930s bohemian Paris.
What is this book about?
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes’s strange and sinuous tour de force 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’s depiction of these characters and their relationships 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.
