“Oh, it’s a grand bad story, and who says I’m a betrayer? I say, tell the story of the world to the world!”

We begin this year of our Lords 2023 with a bang. Djuna Barnes’ ‘Nightwood’ is exactly as the New York Times describes it, “a novel of extraordinary and appalling force—a kind of symbol of sinister magnificence.” ‘Nightwood’ follows Robin Vote through the stories of the people she has infatuations with; the ‘Baron’ Felix Volkbein, the hopeless romantic Nora Flood, and the spinster Jenny Petherbridge. Their stories are told in conversation with the unforgettable Dr. Matthew O'Connor, who can really go on and on and on about the most complex and most simple topics. There literally is no topic which the doctor will not go on a rant about. This, in the beginning, made it hard for me to follow, but with lines like the following, it was definitely all worth it; “I, as good a Catholic as they make, have embraced every confection of hope, and yet I know well, for all our outcry and struggle, we shall be for the next generation not the massive dung fallen from the dinosaur, but the little speck left of a humming-bird.”

A really poetic novel to say the least, I recommend it to the highest degree. One of the first novels to be unforgiving about Lesbian relationships, it seems to have been based on Djuna Barnes tumultuous relationship with the artist Thelma Wood. Try to guess who’s who in the novel.