Nadja
by Andre Breton
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Book Summary Information
Author: Andre BretonTranslator: Richard Howard
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1994-01-11
ISBN: 0802150268
Number of pages: 160
Publisher: Grove Press
Book Reviews of Nadja
Book Review: "Beauty will be convulsive..."
Summary: 5 Stars
In this slender, elliptical, eccentric and poetic book, Andre Breton distills the essence of surrealism and in the process offers what is perhaps the best and most concise single-volume description of what the surrealist movement is/was about. Ostensibly about a feverishly intense ten-day affair with an enigmatic woman he meets while crossing a Paris street one afternoon, *Nadja* is really about a way of living life, which is what, primarily, surrealism is really about. In this sense, *Nadja* is also a call to arms against the deadening conventions of consensual reality, of reasonable commonsense, and of a life wasted in pursuit of the menial and in the shelter of the mediocre.
What is unique about Breton's approach in *Nadja* is its cool, clinical approach to recording the most fantastic mental delirium; its attempt to ground the highest poetic flights of the soul in the precise language of science. The result is a unique stylistic hybrid of stream-of-conscious automatism and psychiatric monograph. As if Nadja were a ghost, Breton attempts to record her haunting of him over the brief span of their acquaintance, faithfully recording what endures in his memory as singularly significant of her elusive mystery: the places they visited, the conversations they shared, the drawings she made, the latter of which--along with interpretation--are among the photographs included with the text.
Nadja, the woman, is the surrealistic muse par excellence--troubled, inspired, destitute, probably mad...and ultimately unknowable. She appears about a third of the way through the book and effectively disappears with a third of it still to go. But her effect on Breton is profound--if inconclusive. The book itself is the result of this effect and a consequent attitude of open-endedness to life, to art, to love, to beauty.
A remarkable text, dense and not always easy of comprehension despite the ultra, even hallucinogenic, lucidity of its prose, *Nadja* will certainly inspire those capable of inspiration; it is one of those books that open a door in your imprisoned mind and don't so much invite you to walk through as force you to decide if you're going to close and lock it again, perhaps this time once and for all.
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