Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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50 of 50 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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51 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Night Is A Hunter , March 24, 2003
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?" and "What will become of her?" and "How 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.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
DJUNA BARNES IS BRILLIANT AND MAGICAL, April 12, 1999
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!
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