Way to delay the main verb! I’m sold – and I hope you’ll join us.

Just in case that isn’t enough inducement, have a marvel at Barnes’s mighty first sentence:Įarly in 1880, in spite of a well-founded suspicion as to the advisability of perpetuating that race which has the sanction of the Lord and the disapproval of the people, Hedvig Volkbein, a Viennese woman of great strength and military beauty, lying upon a canopied bed of a rich spectacular crimson, the valance stamped with the bifurcated wings of the House of Hapsburg, the feather coverlet an envelope of satin in which, in massive and tarnished gold threads, stood the Volkbein arms – gave birth, at the age of forty-five, to an only child, a son, seven days after her physician predicted that she would be taken. He wrote an introduction to the 1937 Faber edition, where he described its “astonishing” prose: “What I would leave the reader prepared to find is the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterisation, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.” TS Eliot, the high priest of modernism, also thought highly of Nightwood.

Dylan Thomas described it as “one of the three great prose books ever written by a woman.” (Jeanette Winterson diplomatically advises us to accept the compliment to Barnes and ignore the insult to everyone else.) More straightforward was William Burroughs, who called it “one of the great books of the 20th century”. In case that doesn’t work for you, Siri Hustvedt also recalls reading Nightwood at 24, “with the aching intensity of a person possessed”. From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined.” I have no idea what it is like to be “pearl-lined” – but it sounds like a good thing. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work.

I’m yet to read the book – but I’m even more excited to do so having read Winterson likening reading it to: “drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. Reading it is mainly the preserve of academics and students.” So we have an excellent opportunity to redress that balance. Winterson also observed that the book is “not much more than a couple of hundred pages long, and more people have heard about it than have read it.

Nightwood djuna