Review: Nadja, by André Breton

Review: Nadja, by André Breton

a review by Rich Horton

Last year at Windy City Pulp and Paper convention, I got a copy of André Breton's Nadja, a surrealist novel first published in 1928. I hasten to add that Nadja is in no way a "pulp", not even by the debased criteria that labels paperback novels with salacious content "pulp". Instead it was a gift from a friend, another attendee of the convention. This copy is a recent Grove Press printing of a 1960 translation by the fine poet Richard Howard. (It turns out that, shortly after Howard's translation appeared, Breton produced a revised version of Nadja, that has not yet been translated into English.)

André Breton (1896-1966) was a French writer and the leader of the surrealistic movement in literature, author of the Surrealist Manifesto. He studied medicine, worked in a mental hospital, and, after the first World War, started a magazine, Littérature. He wrote prolifically for the rest of his life: poetry, novels, criticism (of literature and art), theory. He was a prolific art collector. He spent much of the Second World War in the US, as his politics and artistic attitudes were distasteful (to say the least) to the Vichy Regime.

Nadja remains, as far as I can tell, Breton's best known novel, though Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), with Philippe Soupalt; and L'Amour Fou (Mad Love) also have a reputation. Nadja is quite short, a bit less than 25,000 words in the English translation, though there are also 44 black and white photographs (including reproductions of drawings supposedly by the character Nadja). Surrealtistic writing supposedly includes "automatic writing", but I don't really see evidence of that here. And, at risk of forfeiting my avant garde membership card, the novel didn't really do a lot for me.

The book is narrated by a man named André, clearly the author himself. It opens with a long section discussing his life in Paris in the 1920s, the milieu, his friends, and his theories about surrealism and literature in general. Some strange movies are discussed, particularly one set at a grils' school, seeming to depictg the murder of one of the girls by the headmistrass and her friend. The actress, a friend of his, is mentioned. This is all a tad rambling though of some interest.

The long middle section is about Nadja, a mysterious and pretty young womman with whom the married narrator has a brief romance. Their affair consists of several rendezvous at restaurants and such, of discussions of their philosophies, and eventually of a revelations about Nadja -- that she is having mental problems, due to a death in the family, and that hshe is under pscychological care. After which the narrator abandons her, apparently because her oddly surrealistic philosophy of life is revealed to be a sympton of her mental illness. The final section concludes by discussing the narrator's continued devotion to his theories. 

If I had more sympathy with surrealism as a theory of life and art, rather than a sometimes interesting method of displaying reality at on odd angle, I might have enjoyed it more. It is well written, and the translation seems good. I also find surrealism more interesting in visual art, and in poetry, than in prose fiction. But that's just my taste I suppose. I'm glad I read the book, but in the end it's not quite my thing.