André Breton (1896–1966)

This is a memoir, likely partly fictionalized, by French Surrealist writer André Breton, illustrated by photographs (some by Man Ray!), about his encounter and affair with Léona-Camille-Chislaine Delcourt, aka Nadja. For me, the book benefited greatly by the forward from the new translator, Mark Polizzotti; it set things up and knowing some actual facts put things into great perspective. It starts off as dense, meandering, stream or consciousness & we don't meet Nadja, a wandering "free show more spirit" woman (later committed) until almost halfway through the book - at which point the text becomes slightly more narrative. This is not a hot romance novel, rather the narrative of an intense intellectual, emotional, symbol-laden relationship (not even referred to as "love" until Breton's afterword). There are some weird and totally amazing passages in this book, notably the footnote about love and suicide near the end -- which almost makes the entire book worth it. Although I started the book slightly dismissively, it pulled me in relentlessly and held my attention, finishing it almost in one sitting. show less

Nadja resists the form of memory, it survives more as atmosphere than story.

Nadja is introduced almost too soon, like an interruption not just to the narrator’s life, but to the fabric of the book itself. She arrives hurriedly, seamlessly slipping into his world, and in doing so, rearranges it without warning. From that moment, Nadja becomes less a novel and more a haunting.

She is fog-like, dreamlike, yet paradoxically more real than the narrator, who seems to fade in comparison. He show more describes his surroundings with the passivity of a man watching his life through glass. Nadja, by contrast, speaks and moves with an intensity that borders on obsession. She has known many people, men, stories, live, and she clings to them, leaving traces, like fingerprints on wet paint. There’s an eerie unreality to her, as though she might not exist outside the narrator’s mind, yet she is known to others. She has past lovers, encounters, real moments that don’t revolve around him. Her presence is so dreamlike, so charged with symbolic weight, that she seems less a woman than a portal. When she is mentioned alongside the narrator’s wife, it feels like as though the narrator is reaching for escape, not from boredom, but from meaninglessness itself.

She shows him her drawings, strange, almost hallucinatory images. These sketches linger in the mind longer than most events or dialogues in the book. They feel like symbols meant to be interpreted, but resist interpretation. The novel itself eludes logical structure; it isn’t something to analyze so much as to undergo.

Cannot remember what happens near the end. But maybe that’s appropriate. show less

At first this didn't strike me as especially memorable, a fairly straightforward story about an older novelist becoming smitten with a younger muse only to later become bored the more he learns about and thus demystifies her. But I ended up thinking about it over the proceeding days, and started reading more about it, particularly some reviews here, and began to find it more interesting. A lot of reviews peg Nadja as a prototypical "manic pixie dream girl" and yet the novel essentially show more deconstructs that very idea 80 years before the term would even be coined (much less become such a staple of pop culture). The titular Nadja doesn't merely exist to break the fictionalized Andre out of his funk and teach him a zany new world view, but to then teach him a different lesson, that she is an actual person with a history and problems of her own.

I also read some reviews calling the novel sexist for Andre (the character's) later neglect and dismissiveness toward Nadja when he learns about her madness, and while this is a logical conclusion and I may be reading too much of my modern sensibilities into the work, I don't necessarily think Andre the author is necessarily completely forgiving of his namesake's behavior. He could have easily written a more noble end to the relationship, been more elusive about "Andre's" shifting feelings toward her, made up better excuses for his behavior. Maybe he thought that's what he was doing, and the different morals of the day firmly sided with his condescending and limited "love" giving him nothing to be ashamed of, but in any case laying bare these thoughts and feelings for us allows us to judge all these years later. show less

Léona Camille Ghislaine Delcourt, aka Nadja, is what we now call a "manic pixie dream girl," id est a fictional character trope of an eccentric, energetic, and whimsical woman who exists primarily to help a male protagonist (in this novella, André) embrace life and discover his true self. The character, often lacking her own depth or agency, serves as a plot device to facilitate the male lead's emotional growth. Breton's Nadja is therefore a straightforward story about a novelist who gets show more obsessed with the young muse Leona; eventually he demystifies her and vice-versa: she teaches him a lesson: that she is an actual human being (not an inspiring muse) with a curriculum of her own! show less