Nightwood
T.S. Eliot wrote the introduction and called it a masterwork of its time. A fever dream of queer love, obsession, and the night people who live outside convention. Nora's love for Robin Vote is the love of someone who can't stop, who understands she is being destroyed and cannot stop. Formally radical, emotionally raw.
Plenty of readers hit a wall with the density. One admits “I could feel parts of my mind shutting down,” and another says flatly, “I couldn't understand more than ten percent” of what Dr. O'Connor's soliloquies were actually saying. More than half the novel runs as monologue rather than scene, and critics of the style call it showy, straining for effect rather than earning its difficulty, so much so that one reviewer jokes, “do not read this after the age of twenty-four.” The tone strikes some as bleak and contemptuous toward nearly every character, and even readers sympathetic to the Nora-Robin relationship say “their love was infantilised at times.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
