Back to Agenda

10 Dec

19:00

De Uithoek handarbeidlokaal

2e Daalsedijk 2b, Utrecht

Join the Utrecht LGBT+ group to discuss the classic queer novel 'Nightwood' by Djuna Barnes and make new friends.

Queer Book Club: Nightwood

More info & tickets

Come discuss books and make new friends 🌈✨

Everyone is welcome who has read the book (or DNF, and is okay with spoilers) by the time of the meetup. The book club is hosted in English.

How the meeting works

While we are waiting for everyone to arrive, we have tea and get comfortable. Once most of the group is seated we go around introducing ourselves. From there we have a casual, loosely structured discussion that can go in whatever direction feels natural. Once we've talked about everything we want to related to the book we often hang out for a while later to chat about other things for anyone who wants to stay.

This month's book: Nightwood by Djuna Barnes

This month's book is the classic Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. Originally written in 1961, it is one of the early prominent novels to portray explicit homosexuality between women.

Nightwood "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (TLS). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous.

The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction—there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions.

Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, "A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own") has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature.