The March Hare

I like to think of myself as a good reader. My process is: read once at high speed to find out how things end. Read again at more leisurely pace to pick up on things missed in initial speed-read. Read a third time to get the more subtle aspects that you completely ignored the first two times when you were reading everything literally without weighing the symbolic and structural value.

Djuna Barnes' 'Nightwood' did not really allow for this process. I skipped over perhaps one-fourth of the book because it kept giving me a brain fever, and I don't like being feverish, so I might not go back and read those parts again. The oddest thing is that the feverish bits were all monologues spouted by a single character (with occasional help from another character).
The third-person narrator is fine; eloquent, engaging, enlightening, it delves into the characters through the objects surrounding them and is not afraid to make editorial comment as to their states of being. But these monologues; I felt like I was missing something so important while I tried to read them, and then when I put the book down, I realized that I had the whole story mapped out in my head, although I still don't know exactly how I got there.

In fact, where am I?

The story itself is amazing, and very pertinent to me and what I'm writing now, so that's all fine. Robin Vote is an animal trapped in a woman's skin. She moves through lovers without any will of her own, and only shows her own will when she engages her interior animal in the last pages, attacking her former lover's dog while on all fours. The other characters are so complete; a false Baron, unaware of his Jewishness, a woman who wants a lover to be also a child, and a woman who piles herself with things of the past in order to gain some sort of history. It's the Doctor who killed me, and who almost drove me away. And I think he was supposed to be the character that I loved. But I didn't. I like to be lucid, and he was anything but lucid, and I just couldn't handle the pages and pages of him, drunk Irish cross-dresser waxing eloquent on filth and whores and other things I don't even know about because I just read the filth and whores parts because they seemed most interesting.

This book is giving me a crisis.

What I ended up noticing most of all was the actual book. It was printed on really lovely linen paper with rough edges and nice, wide margins, cloth-bound with beautiful deep blue interior paper.