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Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (Times Literary Supplement). 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 persona 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.… (mais)
mambo_taxi: Nightwood is definitely the better of the two books, but if early 20th century expatriate lesbians living in Paris are your kind of thing, then A Woman Appeared to Me will be of interest.
It's poetry, sure. TS Eliot kinda almost ruined it for me by saying that, lol. It is a great piece of writing, and I enjoyed the ride. Though all the characters speak in "pronouncements," in the same oratorical voice--it's the author speaking throughout--which can make the story difficult to follow sometimes. ( )
I don’t believe you can understand this book if you‘ve never been in a love mad enough to drive you near to death. I’ve never read anything that so described the mental anguish of loving a child living through their own nightmare, where an attempt to wake them only causes a hit and a bruise to bloom upon you.
Djuna and I have shared a fiery, destructive and consuming love for something strange that has forgotten us.
——
Can't really tell you what I read, but it was beautiful.
(Definitely will have to reread; this is probably the hardest novel I've ever read and I need a 2-day nap if we're speaking honestly here. Would recommend regardless—it was one hazy fever dream to the next and I can't complain.) ( )
París, 1927. En un ambiente que fluctúa entre la aristocracia, la bohemia y el mundo del circo, se encarna el enigma esencial de la condición humana en la figura de la joven Robin Vote, fascinada por la atracción del abismo, y en las tres personas que se disputan su amor: el falso barón judío vienés Felix Volkbein, la leal Nora Flood y la ávida Jenny Petherbridge. Testigo de la historia, y confidente de Felix y Nora, el extravagante doctor Matthew O’Connor. Incapaz de encontrar editor para la versión inicial y más explícita de El bosque de la noche, Djuna Barnes accedió a que su amiga Emily Coleman y su editor, T. S. Eliot, cortaran fragmentos —desde una palabra hasta pasajes de tres páginas— para dar con la versión «publicable» que vio la luz en 1936. La especialista Cheryl J. Plumb ha estudiado y publicado la novela restituyendo el material eliminado y la redacción y puntuación original, ofreciendo al lector en español por vez primera la versión íntegra de este gran clásico del siglo XX.
Much of the language of Nightwood is impenetrable burl, root to branch, which curls around the subject in hints and suggestions but rarely points. Aside from the occasional thorns. We enter and perhaps exit a labyrinth of obsessions often erotic and all unsatisfied and leave the characters self-crucified there. ( )
...the real achievement–and where I found most of my enjoyment–is in Barnes’ phenomenal and inimitable use of language. While reading Nightwood, I thought often of Slate critic Meghan O’Rourke’s line in her case for difficult books: “Reviewers sometimes don’t tell readers what to expect or explain that a book’s primary pleasure is linguistic rather than narrative…” What I loved about Nightwood–what really had me inking up the margins–was Barnes’ powerful ideas and unusual word combinations.
...the wonder of Nightwood is not only stylistic. It lies in the range and depth of feeling the words convey. There is irony here and humor, too, but in the end, the novel is a hymn to the dispossessed, the misbegotten and those who love too much. At one time or another, I suspect that those adjectives describe most of us.
Nightwood is itself. It is its own created world, exotic and strange, and reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined.
Few authors have achieved so much celebrity with one novel as the elegant, exotic Djuna Barnes, without whom no account of Greenwich Village in the teens, or the Left Bank in the 1920's, is complete. That one novel was "Nightwood." Overwritten and self-indulgent, it carries off its flaws with splendid nonchalance.
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
To Peggy Guggenheim and John Ferrar Holms
Primeiras palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
Early in 1880, in spite of a well-founded suspicion as to the advisability of perpetuating that race which has the sanction of the Lord and the disapproval of the people, Hedvig Volkbein—a Viennese woman of great strength and military beauty, lying upon a canopied bed of a rich spectacular crimson, the valance stamped with the bifurcated wings of the House of Hapsburg, the feather coverlet an envelope of satin on which, in massive and tarnished gold threads, stood the Volkbein arms—gave birth, at the age of forty-five, to an only child, a son, seven days after her physician predicted that she would be taken.
Citações
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
In our society, where it is hard to find time to do anything properly, even once, the leisure—which is part of the pleasure—of reading is one of our culture-casualties. (Jeanette Winterson, Preface)
We don’t go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now. (Jeanette Winterson, Preface)
Nightwood, peculiar, eccentric, particular, shaded against the insistence of too much daylight, is a book for introverts, in that we are all introverts in our after-hours secrets and deepest loves. (Jeanette Winterson, Preface)
There is pain in who we are, and the pain of love—because love itself is an opening and a wound—is a pain no one escapes except by escaping life itself. (Jeanette Winterson, Preface)
What had formed Felix from the date of his birth to his coming to thirty was unknown to the world, for the step of the wandering Jew is in every son. No matter where and when you meet him you feel that he has come from some place—no matter from what place he has come—some country that he has devoured rather than resided in, some secret land that he has been nourished on but cannot inherit, for the Jew seems to be everywhere from nowhere. -Page 10
...skill is never so amazing as when it seems inappropriate. -Page 14
You know what man really desires?” inquired the doctor, grinning into the immobile face of the Baron. “One of two things: to find someone who is so stupid that he can lie to her, or to love someone so much that she can lie to him.” -Page 22
He knew at the same time that this stricture of acceptance (by which what we must love is made into what we can love) would eventually be a part of himself, though originally brought on by no will of his own. -Page 40
She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in man’s image is a figure of doom. -Page 45
...with her only power: a stubborn cataleptic calm... Page 49
She was one of the most unimportantly wicked women of her time—because she could not let her time alone, and yet could never be a part of it. She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing. -Page 74
And Robin? I know where your mind is! She, the eternal momentary—Robin who was always the second person singular. -Page 135
While living we knew her too well, and never understood, for then our next gesture permitted our next misunderstanding. But death is intimacy walking backward. We are crazed with grief when she, who once permitted us, leaves to us the only recollection. -Page 137
...just being miserable isn’t enough—you have got to know how -Page 139
“Time isn’t long enough,” she said, striking the table. -Page 143
She couldn’t tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you be prepared for that? Everything we can’t bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once. -Page 143
None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last. -Page 147
The trouble with you is you are not just a myth-maker, you are also a destroyer, you made a beautiful fable, then put Voltaire to bed with it -Page 149
blood-thirsty with love -Page 157
So have I divorced myself, not only because I was born as ugly as God dared premeditate, but because with propinquity and knowledge of trouble I have damaged my own value. -Page 163
"I have been loved,” she said, “by something strange, and it has forgotten me.” -Page 165
Últimas palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
He ran this way and that, low down in his throat crying, and she grinning and crying with him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, until she gave up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the dog too gace up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her knees.
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (Times Literary Supplement). 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 persona 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.
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