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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 843.912
EAN num: 9780802150264
ISBN number: 0802150268
Label: Grove Press
Manufacturer: Grove Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 160
Printing Date: January 11, 1994
Publishing house: Grove Press
Sale Popularity Level: 55642
Studio: Grove Press
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Nadja, originally published in France in 1928, is the very 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 the 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 Nadja's presence and which inspire him to meditate on their reality or lack of it.
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Rated by buyers 
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I'd like to think I'm more of a fan of surrealism than anybody else, but even Surrealism has its ugly side. And I would say this particular ugly side is fairly easy to view in Breton's most popular love story.
What is the ugly side of surrealism? Too much incoherence. Although not knowing exactly what's going on gives surrealism it's particular flavor and appeal, not knowing ANYTHING that's going on AT ALL kills the surreal feeling because it takes out the "real" part and turns surrealism into something 100% abstract.
In other words, I think Breton went too far. Half the time, the reader has no idea what his non-terminating sentences are trying to convey. Ideas fly around at random, and while some are quite funny, it's impossible to get much out of something that's hardly understandable. Plus there are many references to things only someone in France in the 1920's would be aware.
Really, that's the only flaw. The character of Nadja (pretty much the only character in the book) is absolutely wonderful. She doesn't seem to be insane and socially menacing so much as she seems to be confused about what she wants in life. I thought of her as a teenage girl, living for the moment. She puts Breton in a dangerous driving situation, and spends money without worrying about its depletion, thinking she can just ask for some more later.
She isn't some lazy bum though. She's educated enough to love literature and art and is actually stable in a variety of ways. Like any other stable person, she just wants a good friend to talk to, and she makes appointments that she actually keeps. I can often picture awkward pauses in her conversations with Breton, which seems very normal and human to me. Strangers on the street wave to her like she's a natural friend. She really is loveable. I know, because I love her too.
If only one could understand what the HECK Breton was saying. I swear, he sounds either like Freud or a crooked lawyer, making up stuff on the fly to be as confusing as possible. If I gave this to people in a writing critique group, they'd be horrified at the incoherence of it all. Incoherence is only good up to a certain point. That's my opinion anyway.
Rated by buyers 
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I read this to keep up my collection of books that explore the everyday - that assume the role of flaneur and turn the daily, mundane, urban experience into a phantasmagoric event. And while there are plenty of books by the big guns of this genre that will keep your mind racing; Nadja, by Breton, was not one of them.
Using Paris as a backdrop and a major character at the same time, Breton used many images of street scenes, paintings, etc to mix with the surreal narrative that tracks his relationship with Nadja/Paris. And while this was an element I found strong in his story-telling, it turned out to be very empty.
Maybe I was too excited to read this and set my expectations high - leaving my impression to be one of disappointment. I would not recommend reading this unless you feel an obssessive/compulsive urge to complete the shelf you've designated for this genre - the shelf that is just one small book away from snugly pushing against the bookend, keeping the others from leaning in a position that puts strain on their binding and producing a shearing effect......like I did.
Rated by buyers 
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It is necessary to rebel against a life of pretense to understand what makes you a unique and valid person. Andre Breton writes that he "haunts" other people because they only know his ghostly shadows, the artificial roles he plays as a social man. He seeks to surprise himself in his banal interactions with people by opening himself to experiences that reveal his unconscious mind. Breton was influenced by Freud's focus on the subconscious, but rejected psychoanalysis because it sought to interpret unconscious mental content and therefore neutralize spontaneous emotional content.
In "Nadja," a surrealist novel published in Paris in 1928, the narrator walks the Parisian streets at random seeking unexpected cues to positive unconscious processes, not focusing on negative aspects as do psychoanalysts. These processes are idiosyncratic and the only events that distinguish and validate the person. They are repressed and must be sought actively.
The narrator by chance meets an eccentric woman who seems to be connected more than most people to the unconscious artistic mind. He takes advantage of Nadja, observing and encouraging her mental exploration in order to understand his own mind. The narrator takes advantage of the reader in the same way, exposing his hidden mental structures. Breton thanks the reader directly for allowing him to write the insightful novel, since it could not be done without the reader's complicity.
"Nadja," Russian for the very fleeting beginning of hope, is considered the seminal novel of a relatively brief surrealist literature period in the very first half of the 20th Century. Black and white photographs illustrate the cues Breton describes that open the unconscious minds of Nadja and the reader. Reading Breton's novel is a very interesting experience.
Rated by buyers -
This was my second reading of Nadja. The very first time, I read it looking for fiction inspired by cities. I expected, and found, a story about Paris. The narrator's mad desire for Nadja who is herself quite mad is punctuated by the thoroughly plain unpeopled photographs of the city. Breton's descriptions of the city's streets are luminous and they play off the fuzzy, gaussian blur of the pictures. What's the connection between these two worlds: the literary and the graphic? The connection is loose, suggestive, less than allegorical. Its tone was urban, urbane too but it would be hard to say just why these two realities were in the same novel. In fact, that loose connection defined for many people the idea of the surreal.
On this second reading-maybe thirty years later-the madness predominates. The narrator's passion is there, raw and a trifle obscene (but fun). So is the narrator's wife who seems to exist in a moral vacuum away from Nadja and her lover. Nadja, of course, is still mad, but now her madness seems less adventuresome and creative and more forced and quite sad. The pictures too seem to point to a poverty of spirit. ( I realize that we are seeing the photographs in translation too: a translation to an offset printed page. Perhaps the originals have a different feel.)
I think that perhaps the shock of the connection between crazed and creative has worn off a bit. We are also forced to remember that these ultra-cool surrealists presided over a scene that slipped quickly into nazism and concentration camps.
Breton is still brilliant on the page, the suggested connections-the things left unsaid still beg us to fill them in. But we are older now and this story seems more sad than audacious-like the blueprint for a kind of world that just didn't work out.
Lynn Hoffman, author of bang BANG: A Novel
Rated by buyers -
Andre Breton, Surrealism's self-appointed Pope, here gives us the Surrealist, deconstructed version of a romance narrative. As much a love letter to Surrealist Paris as to Nadja, this book captures the now-vanished life of Paris between the wars, when the city Harold Rosenberg called "the laboratory of the twentieth century" was still the place where artists went to do basic R&D work on the human imagination. That Paris--the city of Breton and Picasso and Man Ray--no longer exists, but perhaps in the works of these artists we can recapture a piece, a glowing shard, of that spirit and breathe it back to fiery life.
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