Product Description

Barnes's extraordinary first novel, illustrated

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #256802 in Books
• Published on: 1995-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 250 pages

Review
"A work of grim, mature beauty . . . she has caught life prismatically in a humor that, I dare say, no women, and few men, have succeeded in giving us." -- Eugene Jolas, transition

"Barnes dresses the page, as only she can do, in a remarkably flexible array of words, now Elizabethan, now Biblical in tone, shifting in genre from narrative to poetry to drama to parable. Her ability to control the exuberant interaction of these elements produces a text in which women's voices and that ever-so-tricky business of 'female experience' come to the fore fully on their own terms." -- WLW Journal Winter 91

"Djuna Barnes has written a book that is all that she was, and must still bevulgar, beautiful, defiant, witty, poetic, and a little mada bewildering hodge-podge of the obscene and the virginal, of satire and wistfulness, of the grossest humor and the most delicate sadnessa book that absolutely baffles classification, but that surely is a most amazing thing to have come from a woman's hand." -- The Argonaut

Customer Reviews

A Great Achievement
This is an amazing work. A mostly autobiographical parody, Barnes uses Ryder as sort of a twisted extended metaphor for the rest of the world. The beautiful and inventive prose, though often obscure, illustrates the life of the Ryder family poignantly and indignantly. Written in various styles, the book is bound to touch each and every reader.

an astonishing writer
It wasn't only T.S. Eliot who described Djuna Barnes's style as Elizabethan. (Though the poet Marie Ponsot has described her as Jacobean.) What period could encompass this twentieth century writer's talent for casting spells both psychological and atmospheric? I've never read anyone quite like her. If only James Joyce had been a little more talented, he might have been Barnesian--but few of us know this; join us!