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Title: Nadja by André Breton, Michel Meyer ISBN: 2-07-040130-8 Publisher: Gallimard Pub. Date: 24 March, 1998 Format: Paperback

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Average Customer Rating: 4.2 (5 reviews)

Rating: 3
Summary: How did you get here? Where are you going?
Comment: The concept of rating does not apply to this book.. to Nadja. Hence, the neutral "3 stars". How do people come to read this book? Is it out of necessity, as in studying french literature? I guess it doesn't matter.

Breton: "Pope of surrealism"; psychologist; culturally tied to theater, literature, fine art, and political movements; intellectual... elite.

This book is in two parts. The first is automatic writing, meandering through cultural references, Parisien momunents and streets, and famous persons of his era. Its exercise is in hommage of his precursors (ie Rimbaud, Jung) and is scarcely cohesive. The second (starting at about the 70th page) is the portrayal of the ellusive "Nadja", which "feels" more like a novel (but not quite) as Breton and Nadja float through Paris, looking at a restaurant menu here, a fountain there. The importance may lie in Nadja's surreal portrayal... her dialogue (broken phrases, observations) is enigmatic.. She is an oracle, a ghost, an undefined aesthetic.

I've seen teaching guides that advise leading students through the later pages of Nadja and only then return to the beginning .. I can see that as good advice to understand those first pages.

Why would anyone want to read this book? I mean, surrealism is dead and buried (despite their distant protests). But it existed once.. it was during the writing of Nadja a virile and auspicious movement... squarely demonstrated --or reported-- as an art --a literary -- form in this book... Is there any value found here other than landmark... Is there any perennial human wisdom here?

Nadja is not "necessarily" relevant today due to our distance from its culturally and politically rooted intentions.. It purely depends on the reader's knowledge of what Breton was trying to achieve here... and now, nearly eighty years later, the reader is not merely culturally challenged.. So reading it alongside a couple of essays... maybe getting some background info on Breton as well.. a little bio on the net, perhaps, might "help".

But once the answer is found.... and how did you get here, and where are you going ....Once the pregnant artifices of this work are consummed, assimilated, rendered to ash.. the lingering ghost of Nadja remains... and its affects are... .

Rating: 4
Summary: artists and words
Comment: That Breton was an innovative designer and artist and poet is well appreciated but this book shows him to have been a fine writer as well. It also shows how a member of a radical group of artists can be driven by the same passions that probably afflict all of us during our lives. This passion of Breton's is extraordinary in its own way but I suspect we all have these seemingly unusual encounters in our lives. It takes a creative artist such as Breton to bring it to life. But in some ways he only brings it half to life. While he does have a fascination with 'Nadja' - the name being the first part of the Russian word for hope - his wife remains firmly in the background and not withheld, and yet her involvement is completely untold, even unspeculated on. What type of relationship Breton and his wife had we can only speculate about. In the end this is quite a sad story, but then I suspect most of the passions we all feel for the 'extras' in our own lives are inevitably tinged with sadness and unfulfilment. So for me, Breton has captured something here that is quite magical.

Rating: 5
Summary: a necessity and a work of pure genius
Comment: as soon as people see breton's name on a book, they immediately feel indignation and privately exclaim, "the dictator of surrealism!" what they don't seem to realize is that, despite being a flawed and somewhat ambivalent man, he probably had more passion in his pinky than they do in their entire body. "nadja" is simply one more delightful proof of breton's genius and his infallible flair for the surreal, the mysterious, the mystical, and everything that is profoundly divergent. in this tale of intrigue and obsession he travels the streets of paris with a ghostly, clearly insane young woman who calls herself nadja, which is the russian word for hope. the most captivating parts of the novel are the bizarre and surreal conversations he has with her. even though he found her incredibly fascinating and almost an ethereal enigma, things start to turn sour between them and breton grows bored with her. at the end of the novel, nadja is put into an asylum after the police are called because of her incessant screaming and apparently incoherent behavior, some of which suggested that she was living in a world of hallucinations and irrational fears. we do know that nadja was a real woman and not by means some fictitious creation of breton's, and we also know that she came to a somewhat unfortunate end. it may be true that breton's behavior and attitude of indifference and deliberate ignorance about her truly wretched fate (she died of cancer, insane and completely alone) is indeed nothing to admire, but those who put too much emphasis on this admittedly accurate fact forget that while he may in a sense have betrayed her, he also made a truly admirable effort to make the world see nadja and those like her as no one has seen them before, and immortalized her in a book that is absolutely unforgettable and breathtakingly beautiful. breton was a profoundly hopeful and truly revolutionary figure who exhorted humanity, even while the second world war raged and reaped it's devastating results universally on all of mankind, to recognize the miraculous and wondrous nature of our very existence, however 'absurd' or meaningless some felt it to be after the horrendous events of the twentieth century. it is true that he occasionally goes over the top with his optimism, but his iron will and determination to fight 'miserabilism', the philosophical justification of human misery, at all costs can only call forth our admiration. his exaltation of the imagination as the highest of human faculties and the sole organ of man that will allow him to attain felicity seems to be verified by direct, concrete experience of life. as we grow older and we come to realize that sensual pleasure is a big part of life but essentially empty and hollow, our inner lives (hopefully) become more vivid and we end up spending more and more time there. breton knows this and wants us to cultivate it to the highest degree possible. don't be fooled by the 'anti breton' rhetoric and take a dismissive attitude toward him, because you'll be missing out on some of the most fascinating books (to my mind) ever written.