Nightwood by Djuana Barnes.
“I was doing well enough until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes.”
I completed Nightwood by Djuna Barnes a few mornings ago, huddled half naked out of a loft window on an empty square in Venice at sunrise. The sentences had me almost climbing out onto the tiles. This is one of those books, more an experience than an act of reading that changes the way you speak to your lover that night, or the way you walk around for hours afterwards. Some sentences sparkle because they take you into the moments that you were never able to understand, the moment you were standing at the door while the person you loved walks away and you don’t say anything- for example. I am being a little dramatic, but also honest and that is what this work provokes.
Warren and Marlene suggested I read this book. Marlene added it to our shelf order for Yvon Lambert so that I would do so, and I did, underlining as I went and am now back on the second round because thats how T S Eliot wanted it to be read.
Nightwood was published in 1936 by Faber and Faber and is now a classic of modernist and lesbian literature.