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A review by exlibrisalex
Nadja by André Breton, Richard Howard
2.0
Inane drivel by a self-obsessed and unspectacular man. Breton was certainly one of those persons who talks a lot and yet says nothing. The few flimsy "philosophies" he does manage to (poorly) articulate are anything but brilliant or profound. I think he tries to dress them up with surrealist psycho-babble. Breton comes off as one who leads an unproductive, pointless life but due to his delusional sense of self-importance he has to believe that even the most mundane things are pregnant with deep and sometimes sinister meanings, which only he can even begin to sense and interpret (I notice this with a lot of male surrealist authors i.e. Georges Bataille.)
Nadja (the character - whether you believe she is real or not) is really just a vehicle for Breton to ramble pseudo-intellectually for pages at a time. Its never really about Nadja. Its about how Nadja makes him feel about himself or how Nadja's indecipherable comments or bizarre behavior somehow tangentially allows him to further develop and expand upon whatever theory he wants to blab about in the book. Nadja acts so bizarrely that he is able to interpret her behavior in whichever way suits him best while ignoring the reality of her (that she isn't some unusual genius but a mentally unstable woman). This book reads as if Breton had a desire to publish something but had nothing to say or had no idea how to structure it, so he added some crazy lady into the middle part. A crazy lady whose destructive behaviors he enabled in the name of art. Nadja was just a briefly lasting, half-assed experiment for Breton's narrator - easily abandoned when the results were proving to be disappointing and offering a few final half-hearted apologies (excuses) for the poorly handled affair.
Nadja (the character - whether you believe she is real or not) is really just a vehicle for Breton to ramble pseudo-intellectually for pages at a time. Its never really about Nadja. Its about how Nadja makes him feel about himself or how Nadja's indecipherable comments or bizarre behavior somehow tangentially allows him to further develop and expand upon whatever theory he wants to blab about in the book. Nadja acts so bizarrely that he is able to interpret her behavior in whichever way suits him best while ignoring the reality of her (that she isn't some unusual genius but a mentally unstable woman). This book reads as if Breton had a desire to publish something but had nothing to say or had no idea how to structure it, so he added some crazy lady into the middle part. A crazy lady whose destructive behaviors he enabled in the name of art. Nadja was just a briefly lasting, half-assed experiment for Breton's narrator - easily abandoned when the results were proving to be disappointing and offering a few final half-hearted apologies (excuses) for the poorly handled affair.