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.
Told as through a kaleidoscope, the chronicle of the Ryder family is a
bawdy tale of eccentricity and anarchy; through sparkling detours and
pastiche, cult author Djuna Barnes spins an audacious, intricate story
of sexuality, power, and praxis.
Ryder, like its namesake, Wendell Ryder, is many things--lyric, prose,
fable, illustration; protagonist, bastard, bohemian, polygamist. Born in
the 1800s to infamous nonconformist Sophia Grieve Ryder, Wendell's
search for identity takes him from Connecticut to England to
multifarious digressions on morality, tradition, and gender. Censored
upon its first release in 1928, Ryder's portrayal of sexuality remains
revolutionary despite the passing of time and the expurgations in the
text, preserved by Barnes in protest of the war "blindly raged against
the written word." The weight of Wendell's story endures despite this
censorship, as his drive to assume the masculine roles of patriarch and
protector comes at the sacrifice of the women around him.
A vanguard modernist, Djuna Barnes has been called the patron literary
saint of Bohemia, and her second novel, Ryder, evinces her cutting wit
and originality. The nonlinear structure and polyphonic narration pull
the reader into Barnes' harlequin world like a riptide, echoing the
melodic cascade of James Joyce's Ulysses and the avant-garde feminism
of Dorothy Richardson. The novel is a rhapsodic saga that could have
come only from Barnes' pen--and politics--as impactful today upon at its
first pressing, a document of sexual revolution and censorship.
