Customer Reviews

Nightwood

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

First, I should tell you what Nightwood isn't. It's not acelebration of love between women, or of the glamour of Paris, or ofmodernism's traditionally spare aesthetic. It is, however, a wonderful book, which will probably try your patience but will repay your efforts with the pleasure of reading some of the most wonderful writing to have been produced this century. Djuna Barnes, born in the US, spent some twenty years in Europe, during which she wrote innovative journalism, a novel (Ryder), short stories, poetry and plays, and, slowly, the autobiographical fictional narrative that was finally published as Nightwood in 1936. The novel was hard to place, and finally published by no less of a modernist luminary than T.S. Eliot, then working at Faber and Faber.

Barnes' novel chronicles a love affair between two women: Nora Flood, the sometime "puritan," and Robin Vote, a cipher-like "somnambule" -- sleepwalker -- who roams the streets of Paris looking for -- well, it's not quite clear, but it's a fruitless quest she's on. Nora finds herself roaming the streets too, looking for Robin, but, like most of the characters of the novel, she bumps up against Dr Matthew O'Connor instead. O'Connor, an unlicensed doctor from the Barbary Coast, dominates much of the novel with his astounding barrage of anecdote, offering a stream of stories that all point, ultimately, to the sublime misery of romantic obsession. The love story (if it can even be called that) is framed by the history of Felix Volkbein, a self-styled Baron who marries Robin early on, and whose family tree provides the structure on which the rest of this dawdling narrative hangs.

But nothing I say here can give you a sense of Barnes' dense, lyrical prose, and quite amazingly complex and beautiful writing: you simply have to puzzle over the book yourself to experience perhaps the most idiosyncratic novel produced by an American writer between the wars. It's a dark, melancholy story, with much detailed description of the decaying expatriate lifestyle Barnes herself (sometimes) enjoyed. The final chapter of the book has been regarded as controversial, opaque, and/or vaguely pornographic: Eliot wanted to exclude it when the novel was first published. It might certainly surprise you, and perhaps dismay you if you want to see all threads neatly tied together at the end. But I've read this book several times, and have never regretted it for a moment.

There are few books that can be safely called classics--and out of those, fewer are as deserving of the term as Djuna Barnes' 'Nightwood'. Elegant and mesmerizing, difficult and beautiful, it is a measured and balanced work of art.

Another reviewer said this wasn't a 'celebration of lesbian love'--this much is true. What makes this book truly remarkable is that it *doesn't* set any boundaries--hearts are fickle, hearts are cruel, and every character in the novel is inflicted with his/her own brand of emotional anxiety. Barnes makes no distinction between 'lesbian' love and any other--it is as normal, and as abnormal, as any other human affection. That alone makes this book a classic (but of course, the writing too is intoxicating). In fact, what is truly surprising (to me, at least!) is that despite her exquisite elegance, Djuna Barnes manages to take such a no-nonsense approach to human emotions. She never seeks to simplify anything--and makes her work difficult for the reader in the most rewarding of ways. (I mean that she doesn't let us get away with pre-conceptions or romantic illusions. She manages to make the imperfect reality as arresting as the myth of perfection.) Most of us, in our lives, don't *really* know what we're doing, or what we feel. Barnes makes her characters real by putting them through the same confusing maelstrom of experiences--where one emotion often morphs into another--love into indifference, respect into insecurity, and so on. There are no answers--there is only endurance--endurance of others, endurance of ourselves.

I don't want to be more specific and give out details of the plot. This book has to be experienced to be believed...

*Nightwood* is a novel composed in poetic prose, as T.S. Eliot asserts in his preface, the kind of writing that "demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give." Most novels are not composed at such white-hot intensity, at a level of personal emergency such as Djuna Barnes has conveyed in *Nightwood.* This is a book that doesn't let you rest for a moment, the rare sort of novel that is all conflict and climax. It's a work that you don't doubt was torn living from the author's very being, less a "novel" per se, than an organic and all-but-impossible to dissect whole that loses more the more you attempt to analyze it.

What Barnes records in *Nightwood* is the experiential agony, as opposed to merely the "story," of a love-lost. Robin Vote is a Sapphic femme fatal, an androgynous, alcoholic, nymphomaniac enigma who is beloved, successively, by three different characters, who she subsequently leaves an emotional wreck. Nora Flood, who stands in for the author, is the narrative center of *Nightwood* and the woman around whom the others orbit, with Robin, like a doomsday asteroid, orbiting them all. It is Nora who struggles and suffers and indeed understands Robin better than anyone, even if that only means understanding better the tragedy inherent in knowing her at all. Her utter despair at losing Robin is stunningly captured by Barnes who, it is said, based *Nightwood* closely on a real-life love catastrophe from which she never recovered. One can believe it reading *Nightwood.* A good deal of the novel's intensity comes from its unquestionable authenticity. In Robin Vote, Barnes has created the personification of the unsolvable mystery of every beloved who, as if by destiny, eludes, indeed must elude, our grasp.

Much is made--and rightly so--of *Nightwood's* most famous character, Dr. Matthew O'Connor, an impoverished, drunken, charlatan with dubious medical credentials and a penchant for cross-dressing. A good deal of the novel is devoted to O'Connor's rambling monologues which vibrate between madness, comedy, and transcendent wisdom...sometimes all three together. But the transgendered O'Connor is only the most flamboyantly unconventional of *Nightwood's* inhabitants. All of Barnes's characters are misfits and outsiders, sexually and/or socially; interestingly it is the very displacement they feel within their own time and place that most enables the contemporary reader to sympathize with them. The sense of being out-of-step is, perhaps, timeless. But it's more than mere sexual and social deviance that connect the contemporary reader to these characters--it's a sense of the secret life of us all, the inherent "deviance" of our private lives from the "normal" daylight existence of moderated emotions, rational desires, and objective viewpoints we all pretend to share. "Nightwood" is the country we inhabit when the sun goes down, "society" dissolves, and the inexplicable, uncontrollable, and irrational in us emerges.

I found the first chapter of *Nightwood* dull and dated and almost considered putting the book down. Don't do it. Hang in there until the second chapter...if Barnes doesn't catch your attention at that point, chances are she won't. This is a challenging text, elusively and elliptically written, ejaculatory, jumping from peak to peak, a shout from the soul of despair, a cry from the dark night. The characters don't so much interact with each other, but, as in real life, they are merely declaiming to themselves, using the declamations of others as cues to their own speeches. They affect, deflect, and "aggravate" each other in a sort of vacuum, forcing them to even greater degrees of solitude and despair. And yet, through all these characters, we hear one voice, one lament...the author's, ours, every lover's. As uniquely particular and personal *Nightwood* may be, as idiosyncratically composed, and as inimitable, it is nonetheless an emotional document as common and identifiably human as any kidney or pancreas.

A rare thing, a "novel" that is also a work of art -*Nightwood* is a gnomic utterance of the apocalypse of love.

Nightwood is a Masterpiece. So much can be written about masterpieces that it's better to let the master's speak. I was never horrified by this book, but then I have no doubt that Nora and Robin loved like prisoners of one another's souls, and hearts, and as if their lives were on fire.

Perhaps they were "As Rome burns against a nightime sky" (Dr O Connor the philosophizing heavy drinking Transvestite Irishman surmises) "Rome could only have burnt at night."

Unlike the woman who says to skip a few chapters I will tell you every drop of this book is indispensible but that while light and well rehearsed as a good play, the language can be daunting. Buy a dictionary or get an encyclopedia if it's too much but I think the general effect of Barne's alchemy will take hold anyway. I first read her when I was twenty years old. I was in utter astonishment.

I am a writer, and this book permanently altered my ideas of what made a book or a novel because I was ready to receive the genius of this fresh. I have gone back and reread the dense, tightly packed metaphysical drama of the heart and soul and NEVER come away disappointed.

Wizardry.

A must must must read!

Djuna Barnes' short modernist novel 'Nightwood' (1936) is one of the genuine odd ducks of 20th century literature. Written in an uneven, semi-comic, and baroque style, the book is more likely to impress young readers rather than older and more experienced individuals who have lost their appetite for decadent romantic entanglements.

'Nightwood' is certainly an original work, and Barnes' vision of the factors shaping human destiny--especially time, heritage, and evolution--are uniquely expressed. But despite its fluidity of language, many of Barnes' seemingly brilliant observations concerning life, consciousness, and human suffering are more specious than acute, which is important, since Barnes' emotionally marooned cast is badly in need of answers, wisdom, and salvation.

Hiding under the text's antique lathering is a sparse, skeletal plot, one top heavy with philosophical speculations but reflecting little grasp of basic psychological truths about human nature.

Nora Flood meets and falls destructively in love with passive-aggressive Robin Vote, a strange, corpse-eyed, and inexplicably charismatic woman who, despite marriage and motherhood, is spiritually, psychologically, and emotionally adrift in the world. When their affair evolves into a love triangle, Nora turns increasingly for advice to charlatan doctor and Greek chorus Matthew O'Connor, a poverty-stricken alcoholic who is pleasurably inclined towards homosexuality, transvestitism, and self-demoralization ("I'm a lady in no need of insults," "I was born as ugly as God dare premeditate"). Significantly, all of the book's characters are in some way stunted, crippled, or pathologically predisposed.

Barnes excels at dramatizing the failure of romantic love, especially the kind that displays active neurotic factors, elements of codependence, and spontaneous psychological transference. Those pages which detail Nora's isolation and sad obsession with her abandoning lover are deeply felt, haunting, and moving indeed.

In "The Squatter," Barnes spends an entire chapter fulfilling a personal vendetta by brilliantly depicting widow Jenny Petherbridge's status as a rapacious black hole and non-entity. Jenny is ugly ("she had a beaked head and the body, small, feeble, and ferocious, that somehow made one associate her with Judy," "only severed could any part of her been called "right"), stupid ("when anyone was witty about a contemporary event, she would look perplexed and a little dismayed"), incapable of establishing her own values ("Someone else's wedding ring was on her finger...the books in her library were other people's selections...her walls, her cupboards, her bureaux, were teeming with second-hand dealings with life...the words that fell from her mouth seemed to have been lent to her"), spiritually empty but power hungry ("she wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing"), and lacks poise, maturity, and dignity ("being one of those panicky little women, who, no matter what they put on, look like a child under penance," or, as O'Connor calls her, "a decaying comedy jester, the face on a fool's- stick, and with the smell about her of mouse-nests"). Barnes makes an excellent case for the argument that it is not the powerful that are to be feared, but the weak, frustrated, and incapable.

Robin the "somnambulist" is also lengthily described, largely via the use of symbols and metaphors: throughout the text, the boyish, bird-named Robin is described in animal, vegetable, and mineral terms. When first encountered, Robin, who is later recognized as a kindred spirit by a wild circus animal and a ferocious dog, is found lying unconscious in a small apartment crowded with a superabundance of plant life. Barnes describes Robin's abode as "a jungle trapped in a drawing room" and Robin as the "ration of the carnivorous flowers."

The flamboyant, limp-wristed ("his hands...he always carried like a dog who is walking on his hind legs"), dirty-kneed, rhetoric-spewing Dr. Matthew O'Connor, the book's most famous character, is a figure of high camp whom today's readers are more likely to find mildly distasteful rather than shocking.

O'Connor is given an entire long chapter in which to pontificate ("Watchman, What Of The Night?"), though the chapter reflects badly on the wounded Nora, whose continuous exclamations of "but what am I to do?," "what will become of her?" and "wow will I stand it?" reduce her from the genuinely tormented human being of earlier chapters to a one-dimensional cartoon damsel in distress.

Intelligent, perceptive readers are likely to find one passage in every five that sounds profound and poetically illuminating like the others, but means absolutely nothing on careful examination (for example: "Your body is coming to it, your are forty and the body has a politic too, and a life of its own that you like to think is yours. I heard a spirit new once, but I knew it was a mystery eternally moving outward and on, and not my own.")

Despite Barnes' often incredible use of language, the ultimate effect of 'Nightwood' is one of shallowness, slickness, and almost hysterical distance from its own primary sources.

When compared to other literary books written by women also primarily focused on women, such as the five novels of Jean Rhys or Muriel Spark's 'The Driver's Seat,' 'Nightwood' seems sketchy, brittle, and, as one critic said about Isak Dinesen's 'Seven Gothic Tales,' seemingly more concerned with mystification than with genuine mystery.

Though bold and intrepid as a beautiful young big city journalist, and later as an expatriate modernist writer living among the Parisian glitterati, Barnes closed the door on the rest of the world in very early middle age, and became a notorious New York City recluse known primarily for bitterness and explosive outbursts of anger.

Readers of 'Nightwood,' with its essential focus on theoretical, airy philosophy rather than psychological home truths, may find clues as to how Barnes's life went sorrowfully wrong.

In Nightwood there is a purposeful distortion of biographical facts. The past is based on self-deception and self-forgetfulness. The characters speak about their identity as if it were something they are trying to lose by constantly forgetting and reformulating who they are. Felix begins the novel with a past that is admitted to be one based upon deceit. Instead of trying to clarify it, he is compelled to associate with men and women of the theatre who have assumed titles that are equally false. By absorbing himself in this community of carnival freaks, he is able to relieve himself of the need to technically defend the presentation of his identity and he is able to more fully believe in the illusion himself. It is apparent that his assumed identity is no less true than the one that has been given to him through inheritance. An implied assertion is made through his actions that an understanding of identity cannot be achieved by either historical or self-evaluative means. The reaction, then, is to cast the notion of one's own identity out away from oneself as something to be created externally. This effect is illuminated upon in Dr. O'Connor's speech about the continual process of the night: "Let a man lay himself down in the Great Bed and his ` identity' is no longer his own, his `trust' is not with him, and his `willingness' is turned over and is of another permission. His distress is wild and anonymous. He sleeps in a Town of Darkness, member of a secret brotherhood. He neither knows himself nor his outriders; he berserks a fearful dimension and dismounts, miraculously, in bed!" By giving oneself over to the "Night", you dispel with the responsibility for your own identity. It is a space of anonymity that can be used to escape from identity because it becomes something completely outside of the self. The suggestion is that this is a process that people are a continual participant in. It is a necessary ritual performed in order to not only to escape what identity is understood to be, but to escape false layers of identity as well. To "berserk a fearful dimension" is to be rid of the aspects of identity that are used as props to cover what is really unknown about identity. Consequently, the greatest fear of anyone in Nightwood would be the discovery of any certain facts about themselves and, more importantly, their own remembrance of their actual identities. Yet, this is unlikely to happen to any of the characters because they have subjected themselves to enough "Nights" to never remember themselves again. The result is that you are left in a labyrinth of each character's creation where they may open any one door to find another display, but no certainty because the true identity of the character has been irretrievably lost.

Barnes's elliptical descriptions of her characters create a sense that she knows as little about the characters in their narration as the reader knows reading of them. This is not a failure to properly think out the characters, but a condition intentionally created to blur the character's past and relinquish control of the character's enactment of their identity. The authorial descriptions of the characters are largely metaphorical, but as the identities of the characters become more layered the descriptions become more actual than metaphorical. An example is the description of the Duchess of Broadback (Frau Mann): "She seemed to have a skin that was the pattern of her costume: a bodice of lozenges, red and yellow, low in the back and ruffled over and under the arms, faded with the reek of her three-a-day control, red tights, laced boots-one somehow felt they ran through her as the design runs through hard holiday candies, and the bulge in the groin where she took the bar, one foot caught in the flex of the calf, was as solid, specialized and as polished as oak. The stuff of the tights was no longer a covering, it was herself; the span of the tightly stitched crotch was so much her own flesh that she was as unsexed as a doll." The metaphor becomes more than an artistic way to relate the characters to reality. The characters absorb them and they transform into the thing described. This creates a space where the distinction between stage and reality is also blurred and the character can thus create a reality built on their own terms. Reality and performance become inextricable linked to each other. The absorbed descriptions of the characters create a distance between the author and character so that the characters create their own identities to perform. In this way the characters are given as much creative freedom as the author. Just as the author's imagination in the creation of the story is limitless, so is the character's scope of their identity. Thus they are able to perform as they like while giving and withholding bits of their own identity.

The purpose for performing identity originates in the character's belief that there is something essential about their identity that does not work within the social mode they inhabit. In Nightwood characters are revealed to be Jewish, homosexual and transgendered. They have all found ways to express facets of these parts of their identity in ways that are safe within the community they inhabit. Because the character's past is obscured, there is no concrete sense of the identities they abandoned or the circumstances under which it did not fit into a set of social norms. Doctor O'Connor's physical identity does not coincide with his belief of what his essential identity is and so he must create a sense of being through words and by dwelling in places that are uninhibited by social norms. This novel gives a complex view on the way we view ourselves and choose to present this self perception.

OK. OK. We all know that nobody can write a review of this book without eliciting strong emotions and offending some group or the other, no matter what one says. But I think the book is unique, worth a review, and let the flaming coals fall where they may. First off: I think T.S. Eliot was a useless poseur and snob when it came to criticism (though I do like some of his poetry, particularly The Four Quartets.) I read his intro anyway and the only thing I agreed with him on was "...that it is so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it." This is ominously true. So true, that those who read it because it is a "lesbian" or "gay" novel without a deep appreciation of poetry are bound to be dumbfounded...By the way, Barnes herself stated that she wasn't a "lesbian," per se. She just happened to fall in love with a woman. These artists, they just don't want to fall into our pigeonholes. Do they?...All this having been said, I humbly admit that I don't know exactly what the book is about and I'm not too sure Barnes did either, much less Eliot.-One of my favorite anecdotes about Barnes is her meeting with the equally poetic novelist Malcolm Lowry. Lowry remarked later to his wife that he couldn't decide if Nightwood was a work of genius, the results a disorder of some kind, or both (The same could be said of Lowry's work, by the way.) Anyway, I think this is about as honest as criticism of Nightwood gets. My apologies to Ph.D candidates! Eliot's initial assessment is correct: The "Watchman, What of the Night?" chapter is the most beautiful, most poetic and most unique in the book. Unfortunately, the retentive Eliot found a need to make rational sense of it all, and so retracted what his not so retentive heart told him initially. It is passages like the following that make the work unique in a darkly wondrous way: "Have you thought of the night, now, in other times, in other countries,-in Paris?...not to mention the palaces of Nymphenburg echoing back to Vienna with the night trip of late kings letting water into plush cans and fine woodwork! No," he said, looking at her sharply, "I can see you have not! You should, for the night has been going on for a long time." and "those who turn the day into night, the young, the drug addict, the profligate, and that most miserable, the lover...These can never again live the life of the day. The light does not become them any longer...." What am I suppose to say about these passages? They are as dark and beautiful and lovely as anything in literature. If you get it, you get it. If you don't, well, there's a hole in my head concerning mechanical manuals. Not everybody's cut out for poetic prose. There are plenty of more pedestrian works out there about gays, lesbians, feminism etc. No doubt I'm missing the whole point of this novel according to informed reviewers. No doubt the convoluted plot can be made sense of and parsed and diagrammed out for me in several different ways. But please spare me. Barnes was a disturbed individual (as most artists are) and unhappy (as most passionate lovers are). Not everything she wrote made much sense. But much of what she wrote created a unique beauty. It is for lovers of beauty to whom I recommend this book....Those who insist on reading it with an axe to grind or with a vested interest to confirm will find themselves in uncharted waters: Dark waters with a beauty beyond them.

... is T. S. Eliot's description of Djuana Barnes novel. It is that, and much more. I first read this novel almost 40 years ago; felt I understood very little of it. In the intervening time I have walked past, and patronized the Café de la Mairie, a backdrop for much of the action, on the north side of the square in front of St. Sulpice numerous times. Unquestionable a radically different café in the `30's, certainly not surrounded by the very chic shops of today. The Café "nagged" me into giving it a second try.

I am truly grateful that it was not a school assignment. I imagined a Professor expecting effusive praise, and that my report on the book would have to be filled with ramblings on "transgender identification," "anomie," "angst," "symbolism," "codependence," "transcendent wisdom" and of course, "stream of consciousness." And with a bit of luck, I might get a B -.

But when your main motivation is a pleasant café, and a "does-your-perspective-improve-with-age" attitude, then what? No question the prose is rich and dense, with wonderful insights, coupled with sheer and utter nonsense. Consider some of the wonderful passages: "Love is the first lie; wisdom the last." or "We give death to a child when we give it a doll--it's the effigy and the shroud; when a woman gives it to a woman, it is the life they cannot have, it is their child, sacred and profane:..." There is a wonderful analogy for love in the ducks in Golden Gate park so heavy on overfeeding that they cannot fly. But regrettably these oscillate with the utter nonsense of: "He had a turban cocked over his eye and a moaning in his left ventricle which was meant to be the whine of Tophet, and a loin-cloth as big as a tent and protecting about as much." And that is why so many readers, including myself, find the book such a difficult read. Brilliance, alternating with the drug-induced ramblings worthy of William Burroughs, NOT, James Joyce.

"Baron" Felix seems the best drawn, and most understandable of the characters. His child, Guido, likewise, for a minor character. The four central characters: Robin Vote, Nora Flood, Jenny Petherbridge and Dr. Matthew O'Connor all seemed far too opaque, motivation is clearly lacking for so many of their actions. True, a central theme is lesbian love, and its betrayals, with bit parts for transvestitism. All of which I am constitutional incapable of having deep insights into... but still, if reading is too illuminate, there was only a small candle glowing on these issues.

I was struck by the quality of the other reviews on this book, the best, by far, of any other book on Amazon. Many of their insights do not need to be duplicated in this one - one commenter in fact said there was no need to write one after reading Eric Anderson's. Yes, it is an excellent review.

Overall I settled on a 3-star rating. It is a provocative, radical book, particularly for the `30's, with some wonderful insights into the human condition. But it is so hard to stay focused when these are combined with the William Burroughs nonsense. (Sorry, "Professor.") It was with a sense of profound relief that I finished the book, realizing in the unlikely event I have another 40 years to go, there will not be a third try.

I enjoyed the review by Eric Karl Anderson. But I'd like to add a few things about Anderson's identity interpretation on the five characters that thread 'Nightwood' and its meanings. In the introduction of the book T.S Eliot wrote a preface which prepared the readers from possible misunderstandings for Djuna Barnes brilliant story written in prose was a work of 'creative imagination' and not 'philosophical treatise'. I read it twice, the second time believing it to be a different book. From the beginning Barnes persuades the reader to dislike Robin for her strangeness; living but not present, a turmoil in the cold that disrupted the farse of other characters reality when she touched their lives. Robin and Doctor. Matthew are antagonists. They represent opposite dimensions of the self. The Doctor, although a brilliant mind, accurate in understanding the misery of Man is never the less a failure, in bondage with humility and the truth. In the end he curses Robin for existing; having transformed also him, Nora, Felix and Jenny into doomed creatures in a mysterious and horrific sense of how small their lifes became. In the chapter Go Down, Matthew, the Doctor and Nora could not hold a conversation. They spoke to the readers, not listening to each other. Their lives like a ring closing in their personal pain, existing only in the past, like dummies tragically possessed by death. Robin killed what they proclaimed as birthright, symbolically how she killed son Guido, who prayed to the Virgin by calling the statue Mamma. Loved the last chapter. I, that despised Robins personal distinction of morality was able to finally understand her. Her nature made her different; nor human nor a beast. A creature like the night that drifted 'sonambule' through life. No other human soul could be so free, so they love her but it's not Robin they want, but who she is. The misery in understanding it was not in reach. Djuna Barnes also tells a parallel tale of obsession for an image of love. Robin is that woman like an iman, possessed with a childs memory, but that causes a certain attraction to fear. In 'Bow Down' the writer evoked that it was easier to love a lion for its tamer. The story, and finally Robin were irresistable to my imagination. There is a tempting invitation from the writer to participate for the lonely souls (they become) speak to us, and Robin unaltered by their existance leaves us (readers) out. The book is brilliant. Like many readers have stated, it is a very hard book to fully comprehend in its various contexts. I advice those to wait for an appropriate moment in their lives to read this book. It answers many questions if we search, and dig between words and the quality of a genuine thinker, such as Djuna Barnes.

There is no question that Djuna Barnes' book is engaging. To begin to read it is to fall into a mania; descending word after word into the pathetic world of the four main characters - especially Dr. O'Conner, whose errant monologues expose the other characters while covering his own descent.

Is it well-written? No doubt; the descriptions are moving, the scenes (when there are scenes) are gripping, and the characters are alive. But it's easy to fall into the question: does all of the book matter? During some of Dr. O'Conner rambling tangents, for example, I could've flipped through another book or made myself some tea, coming back (as after a commercial break) to engage with the truly consequential passages. Of course it's difficult to know what matters in one reading, which makes "Nightwood," in its way, a bit of a trick.

It's short enough, at 180 pages, to speed through and see in hindsight almost before it's finished. This saves the book; the rush one feels reading it is both modern, and a signature of a paradoxical writer, reckless, but in complete control of the reader's attention - having O'Conner become interesting right before he closes the book.

Aside from my reading experience, "Nightwood" is a classic of lesbian literature, a modern marvel, and recommended by T.S. Eliot (so?).

So, decision time. Buy it? Check it out from the library? That depends. For the lover of conservative styles and plots, probably not. But for the edgy reader, into a little risk - "Nightwood" is it.