Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
Oh dear. Nikki meets modernism, and bounces right off: the sequel. I don’t even get the people who say it’s poetically written, beautiful imagery, etc, etc — I’m just confused by the narration half the time. The introductions by Jeanette Winterson and T.S. Eliot make it sound interesting, and I wanted to get into it since it’s highly spoken of as women’s fiction and queer fiction.
Nope. It’s hard to even keep track of the characters and what they’re doing, for my money.
If you’re a fan of modernism, this is almost certainly worth reading, and a lot better than I make it sound. But sometimes I wonder why I even try to read modernist works: they don’t seem to work for my brain at all. (See also: I don’t get along with Virginia Woolf’s work, other than A Room of One’s Own.) Just as you wouldn’t ask a dentist to help you pick the best horse in the stable, don’t ask me to recommend modernist works…
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