Word: djuna
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SELECTED WORKS OF DJUNA BARNES (366 pp.)-Farrar, Straus & Cudahy...
...Djuna Barnes has long been the dark lady of the New Directions anthologies, and in the '30s, when difficult writers were in vogue, her shadowy short novel Nightwood won the loftiest of testimonials. Every earnest Lit. undergraduate read the New Classics edition, with its foreword by T. S. Eliot praising its "great achievement of style, beauty of phrasing, brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy...
...centerpiece of this collection of Djuna Barnes' work, Nightwood still has its moments of beauty and wild wit. The novel's chief strength is a marvelous ranter, "Dr. Matthew-Mighty grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor." He roars on for pages, mocking himself as a wretched transvestite, reviling dead gods and performing feats of verbal wire-walking, all to take a distraught Lesbian's mind off her wandering mate. "Do you know," he says in lyrical exasperation, "what has made me the greatest liar this side of the moon? Telling my stories to people like...
...Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold was having trouble on another stage. He collaborated on a Swedish translation of esoteric U.S. Writer Djuna Barnes's allusive verse play, The Antiphon, which opened in Stockholm. Critics thought the play largely unintelligible, though one exonerated Hammarskjold, explaining that the translation job was "overwhelmingly difficult-almost like bringing order to the Congo...
...Chambered Heart is just about as silly as this sounds. It piles a mountainous icing of surrealist imagery and rubbery aphorisms on a little cake of plot no bigger than a thumb. The plot: Range's psychopathic wife fakes illness to keep her weak-willed husband away from Djuna's barge; eventually she brings both of them under her spell and has them waiting on her hand & foot. Despairing Djuna decides to sink herself, lover, barge and all. At the last minute she changes her mind and dives into a dot-studded, six-page stream of consciousness...