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. Most striking of all is Barnes’ unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T.

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. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O’Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions. 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. 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. I have already committed two such impertinences 3 this is the third, and if it is not the last no one will. 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). When the question is raised, of writing an introduction to a book of a creative order, I always feel that the few books worth introducing are exactly those which it is an impertinence to introduce.

Nightwood by djuna barnes