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amiboughter's review against another edition
4.0
"I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference from them. Is it not precisely the degree I become conscious of this difference that I shall recognize what I have been put on this earth to do, what unique message I alone may bear, so that I alone can answer for its fate?"
spenkevich's review against another edition
3.0
Be careful: everything fades, everything vanishes. Something must remain of us…
What better way to see the essence of life fresh and anew than through the eyes of a newfound friend. The world opens up as you turn down avenues you’ve walked by but never had reason to explore before, the language of life reveals new slangs and idioms of place and persons.Nadja by Andre Breton is the first surrealist romance novel and explores the surrealist movement through expression in the character Nadja’s unique way of existing in the word. Nadja—Léona Camile Ghislaine Delacourt (1902-1941)—is ‘the soul of limbo’ wandering through the streets of Paris in poverty like a leaf blown by the winds of chance, and becomes Breton’s muse over the course of their short-lived friendship. While Nadja will likely feel threadbare to a modern reader, it was a major work of early surrealist literature that gleefully captures the movement and passionately chronicles the night walk love affair between Breton and his muse.
Breton wrote that Surrealism is a ‘pure state,’ by which one can channel through art ‘the actual functioning of thought...the superior reality.’ Nadja comes from Breton’s life experiences—though the validity of its heroine was once a topic of heated debate—and attempts to put forth his methodology.
Nadja, as she names herself ‘because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning’, is seen by Breton as a personification of his surrealist movement. Her lifestyle and actions that ‘approach the extreme limit of surrealist aspiration, its furthest determinant’ as she wanders about seemingly aimless but with a purpose of her own only accessible to her unique pattern of thought. She has incredible visions, extreme shifts in mood and what Breton sees as a free-spirited and unpredictable being. She unabashedly projects the essence of her being that pulls those around her into a surreal reality that shatters their conceptions of the world. Nadja reads like an early inspiration for the ‘manic-pixie-dreamgirl’ cliche that plagues twee coming-of-age novels and films.
‘Eccentricity’ could be a valid label for Nadja’s behavior, but also might bear a misleading connotation of negative aberration. True, her behavior does often position her in dangerous situations that land her in legal trouble, but mental instability and psychiatric investigation is not the intention of her character analysis. Breton does soon tire of her unpredictability and aloofness and after having a massive mental breakdown she is thrust into an asylum (the real Nadja died in the asylum, spending the last fourteen years of her life inside), but the impression of Nadja is one of beauty marvel. She sees the world for the magic in it, and if a consequence of this gift is to be socially inept ‘according to the imbecile code of good sense and good manners’ in the eyes of the masses, than Breton see’s it as worthwhile (if only a bit tiresome). ‘Unless you have been inside a sanitarium,’ he writes near the novel’s conclusion, ‘you do not know that madmen are made there.’ Her behavior and lifestyle is a rebellion against the code of the masses, a window into truth, and it is the resistance of such a pure truth by the masses that cages her into a label of insanity. To Breton, it is her removal from the life she both neglects and embraces that results in her downfall.
It would be interesting to see a newer translation of this, or compare the translation to the original text. Perhaps it is the translator's work, or Breton’s himself, but the fluidity of prose is cumbersome. While lengthy sentences can ring like angelic melody with a careful streetlight system of punctuation, Breton’s sentences are overly punctuated and so stop-and-go with sentences within sentences offset with frequent comma usage that it feels like syntactical epilepsy. Breton did express an attempt at recreating the purity of realistic thought processing, but it seems overly clunky in its attempts. This, however, may be from having read authors writing much more recently (Joseph McElroy has a masterful control over stream-of-consciousness that replicates actual consciousness, for example) that have polished a more fluid prose. Reading Nadja for it’s historical value may very well be more rewarding than its poetic value, which is still quite a feat in and of itself. The novel flows a bit too much like a suffocating river, and is a bit bland, yet Breton still works magic on emotion and intellect.
Nadja is alive and well through Breton’s work, ushering us with her intoxicating yet obfuscating behavior. While she is confirmed to have sprung from an actual person, perhaps the notion that she is more an embodiment of a way of being or a mood than flesh-and-blood is an equally rewarding viewpoint of the novel. Nadja is the sort of person that makes us smitten with characters in novels, knowing full well that they do not exist but falling in love with the essence of them, the constructs of ideas and ideals they represent. It is a pure love, one that exists by pushing reality to its extreme boundaries to enhance reality, much in keeping with Breton’s surrealism. Nadja is an important work, and one that also captures the reader’s heart.
3.5/5
‘Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.
¹ To further highlight the essence of surrealism, there is a fantastic story of Robert Desnos during his imprisonment in the concentration camps that I discovered in an article about his life. One day Desnos is loaded onto a truck with other inmates and driven to the gas chambers. They depart the truck and begin walking in silent, single-file order when Desnos, as some sort of final surrealist joke, breaks from line, grabs the hand of a woman and starts reading her palm. Highly animated and jovial, Desnos declares she has a long life-line and evinces a joyful life full of good fortune. He goes from prisoner to prisoner bestowing each with the news of a long life-line and future success. His actions so disturb the guards as he so insistently and convincingly paints a new colorful reality of life and love onto the actual reality of drab and doom that the guards cannot continue with the execution and order the inmates back onto the truck. They head back to the camp and are never executed.
²[a:Roberto Bolaño|72039|Roberto Bolaño|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1260522528p2/72039.jpg] named Nadja as one of his sixteen favorite novels (published in Playboy Mexico) and the influence of Nadja is readily apparent through its anecdotal progression and insight into a reality of the essence of life found within the everyday reality. His novels use similar techniques where real experiences form the roots from which fiction is fed; Bolano also writes books like doors left ajar where a simple tracing of names and events reveals a room full of tangible history as an anchor for his fictional reality.
What better way to see the essence of life fresh and anew than through the eyes of a newfound friend. The world opens up as you turn down avenues you’ve walked by but never had reason to explore before, the language of life reveals new slangs and idioms of place and persons.Nadja by Andre Breton is the first surrealist romance novel and explores the surrealist movement through expression in the character Nadja’s unique way of existing in the word. Nadja—Léona Camile Ghislaine Delacourt (1902-1941)—is ‘the soul of limbo’ wandering through the streets of Paris in poverty like a leaf blown by the winds of chance, and becomes Breton’s muse over the course of their short-lived friendship. While Nadja will likely feel threadbare to a modern reader, it was a major work of early surrealist literature that gleefully captures the movement and passionately chronicles the night walk love affair between Breton and his muse.
Breton wrote that Surrealism is a ‘pure state,’ by which one can channel through art ‘the actual functioning of thought...the superior reality.’ Nadja comes from Breton’s life experiences—though the validity of its heroine was once a topic of heated debate—and attempts to put forth his methodology.
I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys.The novel has a very episodic feel, jumping through time on the platforms of anecdotes populated by friends of Breton. [a:Robert Desnos|341972|Robert Desnos|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1239743929p2/341972.jpg]¹, [a:Paul Éluard|708489|Paul Éluard|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1244597163p2/708489.jpg] and [a:Man Ray|111189|Man Ray|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1208830624p2/111189.jpg] (who also provides several of the many photographs in Nadja) frequently mingle in the text and Breton maps out his walks and outings through frequent mention of notable cafes and buildings to reinforce the reality of his tale by grounding it in the physical world through namedrop and photograph².The first portion of the novel is very diary-like, chronicling his average day to day activities working with his surrealist peers. The meetingi of the mysterious Nadja, however, is the explosive force that turns his world about and the catalyst of the novel’s heart.
Nadja, as she names herself ‘because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning’, is seen by Breton as a personification of his surrealist movement. Her lifestyle and actions that ‘approach the extreme limit of surrealist aspiration, its furthest determinant’ as she wanders about seemingly aimless but with a purpose of her own only accessible to her unique pattern of thought. She has incredible visions, extreme shifts in mood and what Breton sees as a free-spirited and unpredictable being. She unabashedly projects the essence of her being that pulls those around her into a surreal reality that shatters their conceptions of the world. Nadja reads like an early inspiration for the ‘manic-pixie-dreamgirl’ cliche that plagues twee coming-of-age novels and films.
‘Eccentricity’ could be a valid label for Nadja’s behavior, but also might bear a misleading connotation of negative aberration. True, her behavior does often position her in dangerous situations that land her in legal trouble, but mental instability and psychiatric investigation is not the intention of her character analysis. Breton does soon tire of her unpredictability and aloofness and after having a massive mental breakdown she is thrust into an asylum (the real Nadja died in the asylum, spending the last fourteen years of her life inside), but the impression of Nadja is one of beauty marvel. She sees the world for the magic in it, and if a consequence of this gift is to be socially inept ‘according to the imbecile code of good sense and good manners’ in the eyes of the masses, than Breton see’s it as worthwhile (if only a bit tiresome). ‘Unless you have been inside a sanitarium,’ he writes near the novel’s conclusion, ‘you do not know that madmen are made there.’ Her behavior and lifestyle is a rebellion against the code of the masses, a window into truth, and it is the resistance of such a pure truth by the masses that cages her into a label of insanity. To Breton, it is her removal from the life she both neglects and embraces that results in her downfall.
It would be interesting to see a newer translation of this, or compare the translation to the original text. Perhaps it is the translator's work, or Breton’s himself, but the fluidity of prose is cumbersome. While lengthy sentences can ring like angelic melody with a careful streetlight system of punctuation, Breton’s sentences are overly punctuated and so stop-and-go with sentences within sentences offset with frequent comma usage that it feels like syntactical epilepsy. Breton did express an attempt at recreating the purity of realistic thought processing, but it seems overly clunky in its attempts. This, however, may be from having read authors writing much more recently (Joseph McElroy has a masterful control over stream-of-consciousness that replicates actual consciousness, for example) that have polished a more fluid prose. Reading Nadja for it’s historical value may very well be more rewarding than its poetic value, which is still quite a feat in and of itself. The novel flows a bit too much like a suffocating river, and is a bit bland, yet Breton still works magic on emotion and intellect.
Nadja is alive and well through Breton’s work, ushering us with her intoxicating yet obfuscating behavior. While she is confirmed to have sprung from an actual person, perhaps the notion that she is more an embodiment of a way of being or a mood than flesh-and-blood is an equally rewarding viewpoint of the novel. Nadja is the sort of person that makes us smitten with characters in novels, knowing full well that they do not exist but falling in love with the essence of them, the constructs of ideas and ideals they represent. It is a pure love, one that exists by pushing reality to its extreme boundaries to enhance reality, much in keeping with Breton’s surrealism. Nadja is an important work, and one that also captures the reader’s heart.
3.5/5
‘Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.
¹ To further highlight the essence of surrealism, there is a fantastic story of Robert Desnos during his imprisonment in the concentration camps that I discovered in an article about his life. One day Desnos is loaded onto a truck with other inmates and driven to the gas chambers. They depart the truck and begin walking in silent, single-file order when Desnos, as some sort of final surrealist joke, breaks from line, grabs the hand of a woman and starts reading her palm. Highly animated and jovial, Desnos declares she has a long life-line and evinces a joyful life full of good fortune. He goes from prisoner to prisoner bestowing each with the news of a long life-line and future success. His actions so disturb the guards as he so insistently and convincingly paints a new colorful reality of life and love onto the actual reality of drab and doom that the guards cannot continue with the execution and order the inmates back onto the truck. They head back to the camp and are never executed.
²[a:Roberto Bolaño|72039|Roberto Bolaño|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1260522528p2/72039.jpg] named Nadja as one of his sixteen favorite novels (published in Playboy Mexico) and the influence of Nadja is readily apparent through its anecdotal progression and insight into a reality of the essence of life found within the everyday reality. His novels use similar techniques where real experiences form the roots from which fiction is fed; Bolano also writes books like doors left ajar where a simple tracing of names and events reveals a room full of tangible history as an anchor for his fictional reality.
zalopunk's review against another edition
3.0
No es malo. Le doy 3 más que nada porque no termina por convencerme la literatura de vanguardia, aun cuando la respete.
Es una novela en última instancia de amor, pero el amor refiere a Nadja más bien por su cualidad de libre (en el sentido surrealista). Creo que es clave cuando comienza con el ¿Quién soy?
No es que no sepa quién es. Nadja le hizo preguntarse qué configura la belleza, que constituye al ser. Qué fue lo que hizo que Nadja encantara al protagonista: su belleza, su convulsividad.
Es un paso evidente. El realismo propuso la imitación seria de la vida cotidiana. El surrealismo es la imitación no seria de la vida convulsa.
Es una novela en última instancia de amor, pero el amor refiere a Nadja más bien por su cualidad de libre (en el sentido surrealista). Creo que es clave cuando comienza con el ¿Quién soy?
No es que no sepa quién es. Nadja le hizo preguntarse qué configura la belleza, que constituye al ser. Qué fue lo que hizo que Nadja encantara al protagonista: su belleza, su convulsividad.
Es un paso evidente. El realismo propuso la imitación seria de la vida cotidiana. El surrealismo es la imitación no seria de la vida convulsa.
izzold's review against another edition
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.75
anandazhu's review against another edition
4.0
to be fair this is 3.5 stars but what can i say, i’m a romantic.
lilianrappersupreme's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
timmiestales's review against another edition
2.0
Basically a man using a woman and her schizophrenia to fit his Surrealist ideals and then drops her when she’s admitted bcs he can’t profit off of her visions and can’t act like a God. Only two stars bcs there were some good lines.