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by: Djuna Barnes
List Price: $12.95Amazon.com's Price: $10.36 You Save: $2.59 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780811216715
ISBN: 0811216713
Label: New Directions
Manufacturer: New Directions
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: September 26, 2006
Publisher: New Directions
Sales Rank: 120234
Studio: New Directions
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
Nightwood is not only a classic of lesbian literature, but was also acknowledged by no less than T. S. Eliot as one of the great novels of the 20th century. Eliot admired Djuna Barnes' rich, evocative language. Lesbian readers will admire the exquisite craftsmanship and Barnes' penetrating insights into obsessive passion. Barnes told a friend that Nightwood was written with her own blood 'while it was still running.' That flowing wound was the breakup of an eight-year relationship with the lesbian love of her life.
Product Description:
The fiery and enigmatic masterpiece—one of the greatest novels of the Modernist era.
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, 'belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch' (TLS). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' 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' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, 'A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own') 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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Homosexuality is not really the focus -- but it's there
Barnes' Magnum opus, "Nightwood" (1936), was her second novel and one of those books that probably 'must' be read, the same as "Winesburg, Ohio" (Sherwood Anderson), or "The Great Gatsby", (F. Scott Fitzgerald). Poet Donald J. Greiner once wrote, "[It]...stands out among post-World War I American novels as one of the first notable experiments with a type of comedy that makes the reader want to lean forward and laugh with terror."
What is the book "about"? To grossly oversimplify this ... Read More
Rating:  - Angels on all-fours and other night creatures...
*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 ... Read More
Rating:  - Bizarre and over-rated.
This book's three main characters ("the doctor", Nora and Robin) did not hold my interest. This is the most bizarre thing I've read despite its vivid imagery and the doctor's often insightful observations. The story is one big whine about being captive to one's sexual/emotional nature and needs. Here are 2 lesbians and a transvestite fortunate enough to live in Paris, the capital of free thinking in the 1920's and a genial place that accepted people with these sensibilities. Yet, Nora and the doctor ... Read More
Rating: - The Night Is A Hunter
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 ... Read More
Rating:  - An elegant classic
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 ... Read More
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