A single flow of thought

The title of this post is basically the conclusion I got from both Nadja and the Manifesto, though oddly enough from a very different perspective for each piece. The novel felt more like a notebook acting as a journal for things to be jotted down at a moments' notice, though at the same time it felt carefully crafted to blur the line of one 'scene' flowing into the other. I still can't decide whether I welcome the disruption of the reading process that the pictures posed or not, because they take you 'out of the flow' while on the other hand sometimes providing welcome pauses. Certainly the visual illustration is interesting.
The most striking thing that came to light for me while reading the novel was the character of the 'woman' that was weaved into the narrative like an underlying layer that surfaced in all these different incarnations, but was very obviously a composit of the same person. I can't really pinpoint what it was in the writing, but it felt to me that any mention of this woman - who I assume is supposed to be Nadja - stood out stylistically, much like a narrated relief. It is certainly an intriguing concept to explore further while reading on.
I very much recognized the style in the Manifesto as well and the attempt at the same continuous flow of thought poured out into the page (that Brenton actually conceptualized in the Manifesto itself) but I think that a strictly non-fictional and reflective text might not be the as well a vehicle for this kind of approach because I found it a lot more inaccessible than Nadja, which you could let wash over you without really losing anything of narrative even though not every single word held the same importance and some paragraphs were rather fleeting, but for a kind of text like the Manifesto is supposed to be - from my perspective - the effect is more confounding than enlightening.