Monthly Archives: March 2020

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I was drawn to this book because Djuna Barnes was a member of the modernist expat Paris-based circle that included Gertude Stein, who I am writing a book about. Although I acknowledge this slim novel was ahead of its time in the way it presented lesbianism and transgenderism, and it creates a unique atmosphere of an other-worldly underworld Paris, I found it a bit hard to get into. It made me think of Woolf, Joyce, Beckett and other modernists, but didn’t quite ensnare me and pull me in like those writers do. Still, I’m glad I read it and the eerie, dark, sub-logical, liminal, demi-monde it portrays is deliciously idiosyncratic and haunting.



View all my reviews