updateghost's Full Review: Djuna Barnes - Nightwood: The Original Version and...
Djuna Barnes' Nightwood is the Plan 9 From Outer Space of literature. It's spotlighted in your collection, only so that you can parade it around to your friends and say, "Let's read this book so that we can scoff at how awful it is." I'm clueless as to how this turgid train wreck was canonized. Nightwood's first sentence perspicuously exemplifies its worthlessness:
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 the 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.
You know, I wrote a parody of Nightwood once. Here's it's first sentence:
Certainly existed there once a remorseful Baron remarkably named Felix, who may or may not have been a Baron, but some say he was a Baron, though the disagreeable group of those whom establish the possibility that his forthright existence was not Baron-like hold that their argumentative deriding contained no substantive sort of evidence to be distributed in debates, while those who maintain his Baron-like nature direct naysayers to the documented accounts of his colleagues and friends whom vituperate the doubters..
Do you see much of a difference? It's funny 'cos it's true. If Barnes was being sardonic through first-person narration, Nightwood might trump Catch-22 in hilarity. Fourteen words into the first sentence, we're bewildered as to what Barnes is saying, and that's her greatest failure---lack of communication. Even the most European-accented intelligentsia couldn't translate this tripe---after months of riffling and dissection, I still don't know what half of Nightwood's sentences mean.
I wouldn't even know what Nightwood was about if it wasn't for my generally-venerable-but-clearly-ill-notioned English 250 professor. It centers around Robin Vote, a concupiscent vagrant who destroys everyone she encounters. Hey, that could be really cool if we didn't want them to be destroyed. There's a pretentious transvestite quack (Dr. Matthew O'Connor), a quasi-Baron left mostly to conjecture, and two bellicose, jealous lesbians. I'm not homophobic, but the preceding adjectives don't leave much room for admiration. Why would I want to read this cumbersome drivel? Barnes could captivate us with interpersonal elucidations, but instead we're munitied with obscure, recondite physical descriptions, all of which fail to be physiognomies. Dr. Matthew O'Connor, Barnes' most potent character, could be interesting, but Barnes only allows him nebulous perorations, all void of verisimilitude or concentration. Readers can't enjoy something they can't buy into.
What disgusts me is that academia and underground poets praise this trash as a "monstrous masterpiece." Yes, excerpts of Nightwood may have worked if they'd been versified, as Barnes clearly has a penchant for vocabulary and delineation. But this is a novel, not something by Homer. I suppose her myrmidons forgot that.
Barnes died a bitter, irascible hermit, probably in consternation over her wretched catalogue. Her abridged biography reads, "Writing did not come easily to Barnes." I couldn't have put it better.
The fiery and enigmatic masterpiece--one of the greatest novels of the Modernist era. Nightwood, Djuna Barnes strange and sinuous tour de force, belon...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.