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64 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Enthralling, June 16, 2000
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.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An elegant classic, March 22, 2003
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...
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Angels on all-fours and other night creatures..., December 27, 2007
This review is from: Nightwood (New Edition) (Paperback)
*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.
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