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A review by kjackso
Nadja by André Breton, Richard Howard
4.0
“…It would be hateful to refuse whatever she asks of me, one way or another, for she is so pure, so free of any earthly tie, and cares so little, but so marvelously, for life.”
Noooobody does manic pixie dream girl like a French surrealist. Intellectual man meets (psychotic?) woman (ghost?), becomes obsessed to the point that you get the idea he's carrying around a little notebook and writing down quotes of what she says (he lists his favorites towards the end) and then bails at the first sign that her life isn't all poetic coincidences and good eyeliner. Literally:
"A story of a blow in the face that had drawn blood, one day, in Brasserie Zimmer, a blow from a man whom she gave herself the sly pleasure of refusing simply because he was low.... almost managed to alienate me from her forever. I don't know what sense of absolute irremediability her rather bantering account of this horrible incident inspired in me, but I wept a long time after hearing it..."
Also the climax of this love story manages to include: an extensive review of drawings that (if Nadja is considered as a *real person*) really lend evidence to that fact that she's probably been institutionalized, a pretty good rant on prison abolition, and somehow, the author making the entire story about him. Truly genre-making, four stars purely out of respect for the start of all the most annoying tropes. Also some really good offerings on the surreal:
“I am concerned with facts of quite unverifiable intrinsic value, but which, by their absolutely unexpected violently fortuitous character, and the kind of associations of suspect ideas they provoke.”
“I do not admire Flaubert, yet when I am told that by his own admission all he hoped to accomplish in in Salammbo was to 'give the impression of the color yellow' and in Madame Bovary 'to do something that would have the color of those mouldy cornices that harbor wood lice' and that he cared for nothing else, such generally extra-literary preoccupations leave me anything but indifferent.”
Noooobody does manic pixie dream girl like a French surrealist. Intellectual man meets (psychotic?) woman (ghost?), becomes obsessed to the point that you get the idea he's carrying around a little notebook and writing down quotes of what she says (he lists his favorites towards the end) and then bails at the first sign that her life isn't all poetic coincidences and good eyeliner. Literally:
"A story of a blow in the face that had drawn blood, one day, in Brasserie Zimmer, a blow from a man whom she gave herself the sly pleasure of refusing simply because he was low.... almost managed to alienate me from her forever. I don't know what sense of absolute irremediability her rather bantering account of this horrible incident inspired in me, but I wept a long time after hearing it..."
Also the climax of this love story manages to include: an extensive review of drawings that (if Nadja is considered as a *real person*) really lend evidence to that fact that she's probably been institutionalized, a pretty good rant on prison abolition, and somehow, the author making the entire story about him. Truly genre-making, four stars purely out of respect for the start of all the most annoying tropes. Also some really good offerings on the surreal:
“I am concerned with facts of quite unverifiable intrinsic value, but which, by their absolutely unexpected violently fortuitous character, and the kind of associations of suspect ideas they provoke.”
“I do not admire Flaubert, yet when I am told that by his own admission all he hoped to accomplish in in Salammbo was to 'give the impression of the color yellow' and in Madame Bovary 'to do something that would have the color of those mouldy cornices that harbor wood lice' and that he cared for nothing else, such generally extra-literary preoccupations leave me anything but indifferent.”