Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
1 Rating(s)
List: $16.99 | Sale: $11.89
Club: $8.49

Nightwood

Author: Djuna Barnes, T.S. Eliot

Narrator: Gemma Dawson

Unabridged: 6 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/11/2017


Synopsis

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes's strange and sinuous tour de force 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's depiction of these characters and their relationships has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature.

About Djuna Barnes

Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) was an American writer and artist known for her novel Nightwood, a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature. She played a significant part in the development of twentieth-century English-language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and 1930s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens.


Reviews

Goodreads review by mark on January 24, 2018

Nightwood is the sound of hearts breaking, written on the page, spread out for all to see, five lives, five people eviscerated and eviscerating each other. These people fucking kill me, they are so sad and so full of nonsense and so determined to live in their own personal little boxes, striving for......more

Goodreads review by Jeffrey on January 12, 2020

”’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.’” Baron Felix is a man of pretenses. He is not really a baron at......more

Goodreads review by Jeff on July 14, 2014

The novel that almost ended my book club. We'd previously read work by Robert Coover, Anne Carson, and Ben Marcus. Cormac McCarthy's Suttree and The Story of O. But it was Nightwood that most of the usually intrepid group didn't bother to finish, a few unwilling to even venture past the first chapte......more

Goodreads review by Paul on December 31, 2020

Djuna Barnes was quite obviously a tremendous person and lived a fairly spectacular life – born in a log cabin on a mountain (!) – father was a polygamist and lived with two women and produced many children – four of her brothers were named Thurn, Zendon, Saxon and Shangar so Djuna fit right in ther......more