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Ryder
From the author of Nightwood Djuna Barnes has written a book that is all that she was, and must still be vulgar, beautiful, defiant, witty, poetic, and a little mad. Argonaut
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1928
About the author
Djuna Barnes
87 books502 followersBarnes has been cited as an influence by writers as diverse as Truman Capote, William Goyen, Isak Dinesen, John Hawkes, Bertha Harris and Anaïs Nin. Writer Bertha Harris described her work as "practically the only available expression of lesbian culture we have in the modern western world" since Sappho.
Barnes played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and 30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens. Her novel Nightwood became a cult work of modern fiction, helped by an introduction by T. S. Eliot. It stands out today for its portrayal of lesbian themes and its distinctive writing style. Since Barnes's death, interest in her work has grown and many of her books are back in print.
Barnes played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and 30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens. Her novel Nightwood became a cult work of modern fiction, helped by an introduction by T. S. Eliot. It stands out today for its portrayal of lesbian themes and its distinctive writing style. Since Barnes's death, interest in her work has grown and many of her books are back in print.
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December 4, 2016This is good. Rather bafflingly good. At a minimum, you fans of Darconville's Cat will be pleased here. Of course for herself as well. A very high point of what we affectionately call the high modernist experimental novel.
June 17, 2013
I sport a changing countenance. I am all things to men, and all women's woman. At one moment I am a young and tender girl, with close-held legs, and light bones becoming used to the still, sweet pain that is a girl's flesh, metaphorically speaking, of course. At other times this face, is it not a dowager's? Sometimes I am a whore in ruffled petticoat, playing madly at a pack of ruffians, and getting thrippence for my pains; a smartly boxed ear, or, a bottom-tingling clap a-hind. Yet again, I am a man-with-a-trowel, digging at the edge of my life for the tangible substance of recreation; and once I was a bird who flew down my own throat, twanging at the heart chord, to get the pitch of my own mate-call. And once I was a deer stalking myself, and it was then (I know well the hour when I called myself a dyspeptic), for my son's good, that I thought up a name that would keep him in stomach and make him definitely a child of destiny, giving him, in place of your gift to me (which was a too gentle, twofold, many-sided instability), the appellation of 'Cock o' the Walk' or ***.
These days I feel like I've been absorbed into a Rosemary's Baby womb. I am jinxing myself now, probably, by marveling that I haven't yet had a nightmare of pregnancy from one after the other of bodily oozing lifeforms. I'm afraid of red faced screaming infants and their tiny fists beating on my insides. Easily the most offended I've ever been in my life happened when I was a teenager. I was visiting in Alabama and some stranger made some comment that two infants sitting near me were mine. If looks could kill I'd be in jail. If this lady asking that could just make the two babies become mine. If the awful looks of people who look like soul deadened cows you whiz by on the highway could crucify you bare feet to kitchen floor. I'm so creeped out by pregnancy. It is the idea that my body will be taken over by parasites that is so disgusting to me. So reading Ryder made me feel like that. I don't know if I feel like the womb or the baby but it is stuck in forever being born to someone else.
Paul West writes something truer words never spoken about Ryder in his afterword.
Writing fiction, she was a woman applying lipstick again and again to the same place, varying the hue or the emphasis, the shape and size, but larding it on thick whenever she got the chance.
I'd say if there was a super human pregnancy term that is Ryder. Nine months in the womb and another eighteen months in the bush. The baby will breast feed forever. It sucks and suckles, grasping the teet with razor teeth. There will always be another droplet left of white substances. Bodily fluids and cafeteria milk flavors. If you could lie down with them bloody and covered in their self making substances. I guess this is something specific to me because I felt over grown in their lives. I could get too fat on this much character. I don't know that I would find anyone at all so interesting as to want to hear so much detail about them, in so many positions. When do you get to move out from under their disgusting human bodies and feel something else?
I have the Dalkey Archive copy of the dolls sitting in chairs on a front porch. Baby dolls have their own baby dolls to hold. When originally published in the '20s Barnes' illustrations were omitted. Some parts were censored and replaced with asterisks. I'm not sure why a picture of pissing in the street or knitting cod-pieces were offensive when all, and more besides, could be found gestating in texts and subtexts. The uncensored texts are lost forever. I am not curious about the silences, however, having felt that they really did talk too damned much as it was.
One illustration is of Wendell Ryder's second woman to wife Kate-Careless. She's enormous. There are people and buildings on the street behind her. She could be Godzilla or King Kong. She will remodel you like you are play doh and she's a formidable baby. Once she's relieved her golden showers on the cobble streets she could suck all of the people inside her loins like the Death Star. Or they could just go missing in the folds of her giantess' dress. I felt fee fi fo fum something smells fishy close your legs about Kate-Careless. He brings home this woman into their bed and it is angry child between them in the marriage bed and the mother earth belly. He already had a wife and now she's dried up kids toys left on the sidewalk. Wendell will have eight children. I want to run away from her impending swelling and when their eyes come down I can't look away because the book has trapped me there in too much. The book is heralded in with Ryder on his horse and women arms to the sky. They could be dancing if it wasn't so joyless. I liked the picture, though, because it feels like the book. It is joyless fun. Look at me having fun and this guy is pulling all of the strings. If I knew a Wendell Ryder I might want to draw him this way and rail against the pussy strings. Look how much I don't like you. You look as pompous dick waver as you sound. The problem is you are still living with him because he's flipping everywhere. I don't want to think about Wendell Ryder ever again.
I liked the drawing of the faceless female corpse. She has five sets of breasts. Enough for hungry children. Birds borrowed from Cinderella fantasies bring in banners of valentines day hearts that say "Beast". Creatures hover and touch the flesh like a toothless laying on of hands. Wendell tells his daughter Julie of Beast Thingumbob. She births ten of his children before dying. "Is that all?" asks Wendell's children when he finishes the story of the dead mother. When his mother tells them a story he won't allow her to read any death scenes. These Julie reads in the cover of night.
Another woman in a tale from the chapter "Fine Bitches All, and Molly Dance" breeds children like a litter of puppies. I hope to not read the word "suckling" again any time soon (including just there when I wrote it). I didn't feel anything here I didn't feel in the rest of the book. West couldn't have been more right on with the lipstick analogy. He meant it as a compliment. To me it is and it isn't. There's another one that comes to mind of anvils and sledgehammers.
I would be totally fake and not Mariel-like if I pretended to care that Barnes played with styles of books from the past. I guess this is some impressive feat. Elizabethean and Jacobian prose, James Joyce and Chaucer, if that meant anything to me (never read Joyce). What I admired is that Barnes could show you what the scabbed knees look like if you were by their feet. She could show you what they looked like when you were a bit different that day. Did you want to pick at the scab and watch it bleed over again? Did the vulnerability of the blood piss you off or make you want to kiss it better? The downside of this is after a while I felt like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day reliving the same day again and again. Story for an excuse to play was not where I play. I was desperately tired of it. It wasn't a pleasure to read. The joy of words for me is not in showing off that you know a lot of them. I don't care about Wendell, his children, or any of the other people in their family for fifty years enough to live with them this long. This man gets to have all of the say, right? I want to run away. I would rather a style that best fit the story rather than a history fashioned to play with styles. I imagine it was a lot more thrilling for Barnes to write Ryder than it was for me to read it. Maybe she felt like she got somewhere, tossed out the bathwater. I don't. Of course I feel trapped by thinking about people perpetuating people stuff so this probably wasn't going to be fun for me anyway. I can't say she didn't succeed in creating a world where Wendell Ryder was the human form of fingers on the flame, anyway.
April 16, 2015
Now this, dear friends, is a Wonder. For those of you with a soft-spot for Style, a penchant for pastiche, a love of lists and an affection for alliteration.
And so, simply:
Regarding Ryder, Rape and Rabelaisian riffing:
"What ho! Spring again! Rape again, and the Cock not yet at his Crowing! Fie, alack! Tis Rape, yea, Rape it is, and the Hay-shock left a-leaning! Ah, dilly, dilly, dilly, hath Tittencote brought forth a Girl once again, no longer what she should be, but forever and forever of To-morrow and yet another day!
'Sblood's Death! Is it right, m'Lords? Ravished, and the Cream not risen in the Pantry! Ravished, and the Weather Fork not turned twice upon its Vane! Ravished, and no Star pricked upon its point! Can Hounds track her down to Original Approval; the Law frame her Maidenly again; the not-oft-occurring-particular-Popish dispensation reset her Virginal? Can Conclaves and Hosts, Mob and Rabble, Stone her back into that sweet and lost condition? Nay, nor one Nun going down before the down going Candle, pray her Neat.
A Girl is gone! A Girl is lost! A simple Rustic Maiden but Yesterday swung upon the Pasture Gate, with Knowledge nowhere, yet is now, to-day, no better than her Mother, and her Mother's Mother before her! Soiled! Despoiled! Handled! Mauled! Rumpled! Rummaged! Ransacked! No purer than Fish in Sea, no sweater than Bird on Wing, no better than Beasts of Earth!
....... Who told you, Hussy, to go ramping at the Bit, and laying about you for Trouble ? What thing taken from your Father's Table turned you Belly up? What Word in your Mother's Mouth set your Ears outward? Bawd! Slattern! Slut! Who gave you rope to turn on ? Slain you are of Slumber, and your Family mown down before that Sword of Sorrow. Thy Brother weeps amid his Diapers, and thy Father behind his Beard!
...
Great things by Little are thus brought to Dust. Fair Rome sees Men come buttoning up her Appian Way, and an Ass brays over Babylon. Strong Nations rise and come to Flower under the Hee of one Emperor, and are brought low by the Haw of the next.
...
Oh Fie upon you! What have you done, but make some Pimpish Fellow a Braggart and a Nuisance in all the Streets that run a Blind Alley! And shall the child, Girl or Boy, stand in after Years a little at the Pump, and say aught that shall contradict the Wry Proportion of its Begetting? 'Tis such who Poison Wells, and make the Hackle rise on every Pubic Inch, and do split the very Bells by which we tell the Time!
...
Have not all Philosophies of Avoidance been Penned for you? Do not Mathematics, take them where you will, prove there is always a Deviation that brings down a Marvellously Different Total, an you had wished? Has not Science proved that no Bodkin takes the Riband but at will, and the Thread makes no Conquest of the Needle, and the Needle has not a leaning to the Thread?
Have not Logicians, from Seneca to Plato, settled it, that no Proposition may come to a Head an there be Wit for evading? Shall not a Council of Women, such as we, make clear to you in a Sitting that had you a Vocabulary of Movement the Case had been a Riddle still and not a Certainty"
Or, with added echoes of Joyce and Burton buried in that Barnes:
"I, my love, am to be Father of All Things. For this was I created, and to this will I cleave. Now this is the Race that shall be Ryder— those who can sing like the lark, coo like the dove, moo like the cow, buzz like the bee, cheep like the cricket, bark like the dog, mew like the cat, neigh like the stallion, roar like the bull, crow like the cock, bray like the ass, sob like the owl, bleat like the lamb, growl like the lion, whine like the seal, to say nothing of screeching like the parrots and all sundry cryings, wailings, belchings, gnashing, sighing, sobbing, screaming, such as one hears the world over, but from a thousand several throats. . . . Some shall be prophets, some sophists, some scoundrels, some virgins, some bawds, some priests, some doxies, some vassals, some freemen, some slaves, some mongers, some pamphleteers, some eunuchs, some hermaphrodites, some nobles, some pussy-winks, some panders, some jades, some lawyers, some doctors, some presidents, some thieves; pro and con, for and against, though never one bourgeois or like to other men as we now know them, but at the fertile pitch of genius."
And so, simply:
Regarding Ryder, Rape and Rabelaisian riffing:
"What ho! Spring again! Rape again, and the Cock not yet at his Crowing! Fie, alack! Tis Rape, yea, Rape it is, and the Hay-shock left a-leaning! Ah, dilly, dilly, dilly, hath Tittencote brought forth a Girl once again, no longer what she should be, but forever and forever of To-morrow and yet another day!
'Sblood's Death! Is it right, m'Lords? Ravished, and the Cream not risen in the Pantry! Ravished, and the Weather Fork not turned twice upon its Vane! Ravished, and no Star pricked upon its point! Can Hounds track her down to Original Approval; the Law frame her Maidenly again; the not-oft-occurring-particular-Popish dispensation reset her Virginal? Can Conclaves and Hosts, Mob and Rabble, Stone her back into that sweet and lost condition? Nay, nor one Nun going down before the down going Candle, pray her Neat.
A Girl is gone! A Girl is lost! A simple Rustic Maiden but Yesterday swung upon the Pasture Gate, with Knowledge nowhere, yet is now, to-day, no better than her Mother, and her Mother's Mother before her! Soiled! Despoiled! Handled! Mauled! Rumpled! Rummaged! Ransacked! No purer than Fish in Sea, no sweater than Bird on Wing, no better than Beasts of Earth!
....... Who told you, Hussy, to go ramping at the Bit, and laying about you for Trouble ? What thing taken from your Father's Table turned you Belly up? What Word in your Mother's Mouth set your Ears outward? Bawd! Slattern! Slut! Who gave you rope to turn on ? Slain you are of Slumber, and your Family mown down before that Sword of Sorrow. Thy Brother weeps amid his Diapers, and thy Father behind his Beard!
...
Great things by Little are thus brought to Dust. Fair Rome sees Men come buttoning up her Appian Way, and an Ass brays over Babylon. Strong Nations rise and come to Flower under the Hee of one Emperor, and are brought low by the Haw of the next.
...
Oh Fie upon you! What have you done, but make some Pimpish Fellow a Braggart and a Nuisance in all the Streets that run a Blind Alley! And shall the child, Girl or Boy, stand in after Years a little at the Pump, and say aught that shall contradict the Wry Proportion of its Begetting? 'Tis such who Poison Wells, and make the Hackle rise on every Pubic Inch, and do split the very Bells by which we tell the Time!
...
Have not all Philosophies of Avoidance been Penned for you? Do not Mathematics, take them where you will, prove there is always a Deviation that brings down a Marvellously Different Total, an you had wished? Has not Science proved that no Bodkin takes the Riband but at will, and the Thread makes no Conquest of the Needle, and the Needle has not a leaning to the Thread?
Have not Logicians, from Seneca to Plato, settled it, that no Proposition may come to a Head an there be Wit for evading? Shall not a Council of Women, such as we, make clear to you in a Sitting that had you a Vocabulary of Movement the Case had been a Riddle still and not a Certainty"
Or, with added echoes of Joyce and Burton buried in that Barnes:
"I, my love, am to be Father of All Things. For this was I created, and to this will I cleave. Now this is the Race that shall be Ryder— those who can sing like the lark, coo like the dove, moo like the cow, buzz like the bee, cheep like the cricket, bark like the dog, mew like the cat, neigh like the stallion, roar like the bull, crow like the cock, bray like the ass, sob like the owl, bleat like the lamb, growl like the lion, whine like the seal, to say nothing of screeching like the parrots and all sundry cryings, wailings, belchings, gnashing, sighing, sobbing, screaming, such as one hears the world over, but from a thousand several throats. . . . Some shall be prophets, some sophists, some scoundrels, some virgins, some bawds, some priests, some doxies, some vassals, some freemen, some slaves, some mongers, some pamphleteers, some eunuchs, some hermaphrodites, some nobles, some pussy-winks, some panders, some jades, some lawyers, some doctors, some presidents, some thieves; pro and con, for and against, though never one bourgeois or like to other men as we now know them, but at the fertile pitch of genius."
June 29, 2012
My first introduction to Djuna Barnes was through "Nightwood," which is a fantastic novel with rich prose and peculiar characters (Dr. Matthew O'Connor also appears in this work, but is not as developed yet). "Ryder" still contained rich prose - the novel mixes traditional prose rich in soliloquy with poetry, fables, and drawings (many of which were initially censored). The book is less structured than "Nightwood," however, in terms of plot (of which there is not much). The afterward by Paul West appropriately compares Barnes' style in this work - an anti-novel of sorts - with the anti-art of the Dadaists, particularly Max Ernst. It is also described there as a book that "looks forward to 'Ulysses'," particularly so because of the sumptuous prose. The words dance across the page, though the meanings are not always clear, even after careful dissection; it should be read again for this purpose if time permits. Overall, I found it a good work, but not nearly as rewarding as "Nightwood" by the time the reader reaches the end.
November 21, 2023
Like her masterpiece and, in my opinion one of a handful of the great novels of modernism of the last century Nightwood, Ryder is full of wonderful sumptuous uses of English worthy of the greatest stylists in the language. Ryder also exemplifies Stephen Moore's concept of the novel as a fictional exercise in various rhetorical forms as it includes so many registers and strategies: letters, lyric poems, some Chaucerian Middle English narrative verse, etc. etc. Sadly, however, the fragmentary nature of the work--each chapter doing what it does with often only a semi-coherent contribution to make to the narrative as a whole--is, I think, bound to disappoint most readers. It did me. Other similar experiments in this form--Moby Dick, Ulysses--tell far more compelling stories and thus succeed where Ryder somehow falters. Not that there aren't moments of brilliance and great beauty--there are! But the whole becomes a kind of slog when all it really has to say is "My father believed in free love and thus I'm part of a huge clan." Even, dare I say it, sometimes the prose gets in the way of what the novel is trying to say. This never happens in Nightwood, a near perfect novel. So maybe I'm being a bit more harsh with Ms. Barnes because of some very high expectations.
January 28, 2024
The rating is my fault. The novel was just too experimental and dense for me. The book alternated between admiration for her varying writing style and falling asleep. I'll leave this book to the English and Gender Studies majors.
January 6, 2011
More wit and creativity than her male contemporaries seemed to have. A very interesting read.
March 18, 2024
Say it for Nightwood as well but in it the authorly voice there is far more present and intrusive, though when it’s so brilliant it’s hard to find upset in this. The greatest trick of Ryder is that of transparency, where you can believe the characters of a fiction will perpetuate its motion self sustaining without the author’s voice. This trick is given weight by the archaic epic poeticism of the narrative, induction into a family chronicle by route of the patriarch as the first to speak of the eponymous family. But in prescience and context, as a skewed document of Barnes’ actual family, the control that Wendell can have over his and his women’s tale is only illusive, losing form methodically and slow, partially to Barnes’ dissatisfaction of style. From child’s lullaby, to Shakespearean soliloquy, to blushing sentimentalism, again and again, the waning characters she holds imperial control over are put through waves and disparate consciousness, and it shows Barnes’ sense of the novel. Not a motor as run by the straining novelistic storytelling, but as the new form of poetical expression, a thrashing ground to manifest anew from.
February 1, 2023
As if divinely inspired by an evil polygamous god of excrement and bile and the stickiest of ribaldry. I love Barnes for a lot of reasons, but on a very broad and concise way, I tend to love a prose that is nearly poetry (as I tend to love a poetry that is nearly prose). This novel is so flagrantly unconcerned with narrative for such long and bewitching stretches, that when it pops back up it is but a delightfully odd further installment in a long chain of profusely spilling word-yaks.
Lots of this is made up of the type of passages you read four or five times, slower and slower each time, only to find yourself turning up naught but a rank goose egg. Other stuff here is so sharply witty and brilliant and immediate that it sparkles like gemstones. I like all of it.
Lots of this is made up of the type of passages you read four or five times, slower and slower each time, only to find yourself turning up naught but a rank goose egg. Other stuff here is so sharply witty and brilliant and immediate that it sparkles like gemstones. I like all of it.
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February 24, 2024DNF
J'arrive à voir les qualités mais j'adhère pas du tout au style et j'ai pas réussi à rentrer dans l'histoire, c'est clairement pas pour moi.
J'arrive à voir les qualités mais j'adhère pas du tout au style et j'ai pas réussi à rentrer dans l'histoire, c'est clairement pas pour moi.
February 13, 2016
A fascinating missing link in literary history: one half Tristram Shandy, one half Ulysses, uniquely female in scope and subject, and as grotesque as anything I've read outside of Gargantua. I can't say I enjoyed reading RYDER - it's extremely inconsistent, morally all over the map, and has barely any plot cohesion - and would struggle to recommend it, but as part of an anthropological study of female experimental literature (this spring's project), it's tremendously interesting. It sings when it's simplest and it struggles when it pushes into the experimental. If only it were the other way round.
February 28, 2022
heartbreakingly bad, i had high hopes from my long ago memories of loving nightwood, but even being perhaps unmeetably high they were dashed. it has the same problem spenser does (which could be seen as a sort of praise) in that it's effected in an imitation of a style barnes doesn't fully grasp, and not just one style, several clashing ones from separate centuries.
January 5, 2014
This book is very difficult to make it through. I'm not smart enough to understand what the hell the author is doing.
June 13, 2016
3.5 stars
May 27, 2019
Like others, I first encountered Barnes through Nightwood when I was deep into Modernist poets and writers and educating myself on dada and Surrealism. In the context of the left bank lesbians, I found her experimental novel fun to read.
I hadn't known about Ryder until helping my friend reorganize his bookshelf. It found me at just the right time. This novel is more of a hybrid work. Although it experiments with style at the level of the sentence, preferring the "and" logic of the Bible (similar to Cormac McCarthy), it's also experimenting with form. The "story" roughly follows the woes of the titular character, Wendell Ryder, as he forms a polyamorous family with two women and eight children. However, the true star of the show is Ryder's mother, Sophia, who casts a powerful spell over her son as he struggles with fortitude. In some sections, we see Ryder as patriarch. In one of my favorites, "The Beast Thingumbob," he invites his children fishing by saying, "Fish... are cool and firm like the handshake of a friend," and then tells them a nonsensical bedtime story with no moral and a lot of erotic energy. In many episodes in his life, including the last scene where he begs his mother for advice on which of his lovers to choose, he seems overwrought and emasculated.
For the patience lover of language, this mighty volume packs in a density that surprised me. Nearly every paragraph is crammed with arcane Victorian language, made up idioms, absurd similes, and unnecessary adjectives. It slowed my reading down considerably and made this "novel" more about the nostalgia for Victorian intricacies and frivolities and less about the plot.
One of the bizarrest sections is a nineteen page poem in hilariously-emphasized iambic pentameter that reminds me of Pynchon's song lyrics. Usually, iambic pentameter sounds fairly normal in English, but here, it's exaggerated and forced by placing an umlaut over many impose e's so that a short word like "things" becomes "thingës," which I pronounced with a sort of olde englishe accent. Reading this aloud had me in tears, as it's about Wendell's obsession with cows.
It's rare that a novel inspires me to expand what I thought was possible in longform experimental prose. This experience totally changed my approach to writing by resetting my "readability meter." Not many people would be delighted by wordplay and sustained by the sheer density of description, but judging by the positive reception that Barnes received, and the hunger we have for language made new, it's worth pursuing that rare audience. Thanks for renewing my hope.
I hadn't known about Ryder until helping my friend reorganize his bookshelf. It found me at just the right time. This novel is more of a hybrid work. Although it experiments with style at the level of the sentence, preferring the "and" logic of the Bible (similar to Cormac McCarthy), it's also experimenting with form. The "story" roughly follows the woes of the titular character, Wendell Ryder, as he forms a polyamorous family with two women and eight children. However, the true star of the show is Ryder's mother, Sophia, who casts a powerful spell over her son as he struggles with fortitude. In some sections, we see Ryder as patriarch. In one of my favorites, "The Beast Thingumbob," he invites his children fishing by saying, "Fish... are cool and firm like the handshake of a friend," and then tells them a nonsensical bedtime story with no moral and a lot of erotic energy. In many episodes in his life, including the last scene where he begs his mother for advice on which of his lovers to choose, he seems overwrought and emasculated.
For the patience lover of language, this mighty volume packs in a density that surprised me. Nearly every paragraph is crammed with arcane Victorian language, made up idioms, absurd similes, and unnecessary adjectives. It slowed my reading down considerably and made this "novel" more about the nostalgia for Victorian intricacies and frivolities and less about the plot.
One of the bizarrest sections is a nineteen page poem in hilariously-emphasized iambic pentameter that reminds me of Pynchon's song lyrics. Usually, iambic pentameter sounds fairly normal in English, but here, it's exaggerated and forced by placing an umlaut over many impose e's so that a short word like "things" becomes "thingës," which I pronounced with a sort of olde englishe accent. Reading this aloud had me in tears, as it's about Wendell's obsession with cows.
It's rare that a novel inspires me to expand what I thought was possible in longform experimental prose. This experience totally changed my approach to writing by resetting my "readability meter." Not many people would be delighted by wordplay and sustained by the sheer density of description, but judging by the positive reception that Barnes received, and the hunger we have for language made new, it's worth pursuing that rare audience. Thanks for renewing my hope.
August 8, 2024
What did Djuna Barnes' family get up to there on Storm King Mountain? I read some of Barnes' life to try and understand this novel, or maybe memoir, and found it even more interesting than the novel (the storied way she got her first reporting job at the Daily Eagle mirrors that of Alfred Kazin getting his first job at New Republic). Her writing kept me reading though I didn't understand everything; it seemed to thumb its nose at the florid writing of the previous century and hid a lot of satire, sometimes bitter, as in the chapter about rape. Better still were the illustrations.
March 7, 2022
Ryder is a playful, lyrical thinly veiled family history of Djuna Barnes' clan in the vein of Ulysses, with shifting styles throughout, including Chaucerian verse. It's definitely no Nightwood, but it's strange portrayal of polygamy and isolation is a searing indictment of the patriachal nuclear family. It deserves to be taught in feminist classes with the same vigor as people teach Ulysses, though is a forgotten classic.
January 7, 2023
absurd. audacious. farcical. unlike anything i have ever read, every single page is packed with such linguistic novelty and innovation that it’s hard to even explain god why i love this book so fucking much. crying that it’s over and i re-read every chapter about 3 times. i am beyond words
November 10, 2018
Alienating, off-putting, possibly brilliant .. will require a second read, if not a third.
November 8, 2023
Absolutely amazing. Ryder is distinct from Nightwood yet noticeably from the same mind. I need to have a think about a review but Djuna Barnes is incredible.
June 29, 2023
In my opinion, it has the same level of artistic excellence any reader can find in Joyce's Ulysses or Woolf's Orlando, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.
Currently reading
January 15, 2008I will continue to attempt reading this book over and over again. Her style perplex is definitely requiring full attention that I have yet to give it.
October 7, 2009
She sure makes it exhausting...
February 10, 2011
This book fucking sucks.
November 19, 2011
I need more time with you, Ryder.
December 3, 2011
i only give this a three because i have to re-read it, ok, it might have flummoxed me the first time but, next time djuna, i will be way too laid back to be flummoxed again.
June 8, 2012
"******"
September 21, 2013
"at the fertile pitch of genius."
Barnes says it best herself.
Barnes says it best herself.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews