Extract

Early in 1880, in spite of a unanimous prediction that she would be a boy, the second child of the house of Volkbein was born a girl.

Across the cabarets and rented rooms of interwar Paris and Vienna, a cast of exiles and wanderers orbit a woman named Robin Vote, who moves through the world with the somnambulant beauty of someone not quite present to it. This 1936 novel, championed by T.S. Eliot, is less a narrative than a prose poem of longing, its sentences baroque, allusive, dense with strange perfume. Doctor O'Connor delivers monologues of such operatic despair they become a kind of philosophy. The novel belongs to the night, to those whom daylight society excludes. Barnes wrote from the margins about the margins, yet her language reaches for the absolute. It is a dazzling, difficult book that asks not to be understood but inhabited, felt in the body like fever.