I’m still not sold – but perhaps I lack the right training. TS Eliot once wrote that Nightwood is “so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry” can appreciate it. She makes you check and recheck where you are, leaving you like a booky Tantalus, eternally grasping for meaning just out of reach. It’s difficult – but not without purpose. “She seemed to have a skin that was the pattern of her costume: a bodice of lozenges, red and yellow, low in the back and ruffled over and under the arms, faded with the reek of her three-a-day control, red tights, laced boots – one somehow felt they ran through her as the design runs through hard holiday candies, and the bulge in the groin where she took the bar, one foot caught in the flex of the calf, was as solid, specialised and polished as oak.”īarnes often deliberately severs the link between her main verbs and her subjects in these long unwieldy sentences. But I hope that if I read the book again, I might well learn to love it. I’m still stumped by a “fragment of resuscitation” and there’s plenty more that I think I’m missing. Nightwood takes a bit of fudging and a few mental loops, but it has a kind of charm.

Or he is listening and expounding on what he hears and interjecting. I suppose the idea of listening with loquacity is funny, even if her exact meaning is elusive. “With the fury of a fanatic he hunted down his own disqualification, rearticulating the bones of the Imperial Courts long forgotten (those long remembered can alone claim to be long forgotten), listening with an unbecoming loquacity to officials and guardians for fear that his inattention might lose him some fragment of his resuscitation.”īarnes loves contradictions. There are some glorious surprises and descriptions – here’s a description of the first chapter’s main subject, Felix: Just as her outcast characters are trying to shrug off the shackles of early 20th-century society, so Barnes breaks the rules of prose. Barnes throws out the rules of structure, form and even sentence construction – and that’s part of the fascination. We asked for modernism - and boy, did we get it.

Nightwood book