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luxxybee97 's review for:
Nadja
by André Breton
2 stars
tl;dr: *ndr* Br*t*n as soon as I see you in the afterlife it’s on sight!!!
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What a convoluted, wilfully impenetrable, and frankly really mean-spirited book Nadja is. I’m not saying there aren’t occasions when the prose is quite evocative – since it’s clear that Breton does have skill as an author – but it’s just so, so, so up its own arse that it becomes unbearable to read the more you go on. Definitely dated, the kind of book that could only have been written and held up as a masterpiece in the early 20th century (and even then you would expect something like this, I think, more from the late 1800s (but the French do love to be an exception to the rule, don’t they?)). For all the imagery and symbolism might be interesting, therefore, when it’s so hard to actually make sense of it, it’s really hard to find a reason why you should also actually care.
But let’s come on to the title character herself, and how Breton reduces what was in real life a young woman with obvious issues – and more importantly, a young woman who he could have probably materially helped, if he so desired – into basically the 1920s Parisian equivalent of a manic pixie dream girl. That’s not to say that you can’t have characters who are symbolic or who are inspired by people in real life. However, there’s something really insidious about the power imbalance between them, especially given the intro to my edition of the book and all the further background light this shed on Nadja’s situation. The fact that she herself didn’t want Breton to write about her in this way – which he did anyway – just proves my point, if you ask me. Important to the surrealist movement it may be, sure, but Nadja is ultimately a dense mire of purple prose, and the injustice at the heart of it, however symbolically important it may be, is just not enough to redeem the book or its author in my eyes.
tl;dr: *ndr* Br*t*n as soon as I see you in the afterlife it’s on sight!!!
-
What a convoluted, wilfully impenetrable, and frankly really mean-spirited book Nadja is. I’m not saying there aren’t occasions when the prose is quite evocative – since it’s clear that Breton does have skill as an author – but it’s just so, so, so up its own arse that it becomes unbearable to read the more you go on. Definitely dated, the kind of book that could only have been written and held up as a masterpiece in the early 20th century (and even then you would expect something like this, I think, more from the late 1800s (but the French do love to be an exception to the rule, don’t they?)). For all the imagery and symbolism might be interesting, therefore, when it’s so hard to actually make sense of it, it’s really hard to find a reason why you should also actually care.
But let’s come on to the title character herself, and how Breton reduces what was in real life a young woman with obvious issues – and more importantly, a young woman who he could have probably materially helped, if he so desired – into basically the 1920s Parisian equivalent of a manic pixie dream girl. That’s not to say that you can’t have characters who are symbolic or who are inspired by people in real life. However, there’s something really insidious about the power imbalance between them, especially given the intro to my edition of the book and all the further background light this shed on Nadja’s situation. The fact that she herself didn’t want Breton to write about her in this way – which he did anyway – just proves my point, if you ask me. Important to the surrealist movement it may be, sure, but Nadja is ultimately a dense mire of purple prose, and the injustice at the heart of it, however symbolically important it may be, is just not enough to redeem the book or its author in my eyes.