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3.37 AVERAGE
3.37 AVERAGE
This was one of the first books I read as an inhabitant of NYC.
Book: borrowed from Chuck L.
Book: borrowed from Chuck L.
Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.
I found this artful. It worked on a cloudy Friday, a holiday from work. Shorn of ambition and venturing out for a pint (or two) of Czech pilsner. A man of letters encounters a beguiling woman. Something like synchronicity develops, though with blurred edges that suggest a chemical imbalance.
This brief novel reaches out to other works, other authors. There are plenty of photographs and drawings from the mysterious Nadja. The capricious perforations denote the surrealist logic. Nadja is a lodestar in milieu where the masses froth and scream for prophets and assassins.
I found this artful. It worked on a cloudy Friday, a holiday from work. Shorn of ambition and venturing out for a pint (or two) of Czech pilsner. A man of letters encounters a beguiling woman. Something like synchronicity develops, though with blurred edges that suggest a chemical imbalance.
This brief novel reaches out to other works, other authors. There are plenty of photographs and drawings from the mysterious Nadja. The capricious perforations denote the surrealist logic. Nadja is a lodestar in milieu where the masses froth and scream for prophets and assassins.
Mildly diverting surrealist love story. The author's tedious and intellectually empty search for profundity in coincidences, chance meetings, and mystical proclamations frustrated me - surely there's more to surrealism than this? I got a sense of what Paris was like at the start of the twentieth century though, which was nice.
Le coeur humain, beau comme un sismographe.
Une seule étoile parce que j'ai détesté ce livre et que j'ai dû me forcer à le terminer pour mes TPE.
Une seule étoile parce que j'ai détesté ce livre et que j'ai dû me forcer à le terminer pour mes TPE.
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Bleh. This book just kinda annoyed me. Can’t believe I share my name with this book, such an embarrassment.
My first adventure in Surrealism via the Barthelme Book Syllabus. It's obvious Breton is a master, but I couldn't get involved with his story. There were some lines that gave me pause and a lot to ponder, but overall it felt like I was reading something for school rather than enjoyment or personal growth.
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.
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
mysterious
slow-paced