Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

By Djuna Barnes

The fiery and enigmatic masterpiece—one of the best novels of the Modernist era.Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' unusual and sinuous journey de strength, "belongs to that small type of books that by some means replicate a time or an epoch" (Times Literary Supplement). that point is the interval among the 2 international Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds within the decadent shadows of Europe's nice towns, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a international within which the bounds of sophistication, faith, and sexuality are daring yet unusually porous.

The oversized characters who inhabit this global are essentially the most memorable in all of fiction—there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the yank expatriate who marries him after which engages in a sequence of affairs, first with Nora Flood after which with Jenny Petherbridge, using all of her enthusiasts to distraction along with her ardour for wandering on my own within the evening; and there's Dr....

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Example text

The Catholic is the girl that you love so much that she can lie to you, and the Protestant is the girl that loves you so much that you can lie to her, and pretend a lot that you do not feel. Luther, and I hope you don’t mind my saying so, was as bawdy an old ram as ever trampled his own straw, because the custody of the people’s ‘remissions’ of sins and indulgences had been snatched out of his hands, which was in that day in the shape of half of all they had and which the old monk of Wittenberg had intended to get off with in his own way.

That’s how alive is the language of this text. Robin, Nora, Jenny. Robin’s brief and disastrous marriage to Baron Felix, Felix’s own story of inferiority and loss, the underworld life of Paris, all are seen through the glittering eyes of a creature half leprechaun, half angel, half freak, half savant, half man, half woman, the “doctor,” Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’Connor. It is the doctor who first finds Robin Vote drowned in drink. ’” It is the doctor who talks his way through life as though words were a needle and thread that could mend it.

This is a work of creative imagination, not a philosophical treatise. As I said at the beginning, I am conscious of impertinence in introducing the book at all; and to have read a book a good many times does not necessarily put one in the right knowledge of what to say to those who have not yet read it. What I would leave the reader prepared to find is the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.

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