Nadja

André Breton — 1960

"Nadja, " originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life. The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in teh city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various "surreal" people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in naja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. "The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as "not so much a thing as a way things happen, " Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.

Reviews

jess@visceralreverie

Jan 7, 2024

so agonizing to read. a pure objectification; an apparent elucidation of a muse in the eyes of a man, in spite of the sentimentality he owns towards Nadja, eventually neglects here and proceed to commemorate a form of memorial, these letters, to her, while also completely treating her like an absolute, mere object of his desire, of the muse to his surrealist artistry he holds so proudly of. to the end of the book there’s a despicable awareness of how the emphasis of himself as a being of desire was irrevocably, inevitably human and wrong, but slides it off with the attenuation of his art as a proof of his dis-neglect: this book, a dedication of her, to him was the most he could do: a dispel of his desire for Nadja and instead convict this book to become an altar of worship for her, where as the matter of fact it was actually the contradiction, of how despicably disintegrating to see Nadja being portrayed as a mere frail, fragile woman, and forever serve to him as a muse for his art. despite the romanticism and poetic power of its prose, its narrative, and also the consideration of how it was a norm back in his days, it is, for me, so agonizing that it dispels his oeuvre that supposedly incredibly romantic and beautiful. to me, it’s just not.