According to the back of the Grove Press edition, Nadja is the actual account of the author's relationship with a woman in Paris. While this isn't apparent at first, what caught me was the style of the book. It read like a book from my Nonfiction class. Breton takes many jumps throughout the narrative; it's almost a stream of consciousness type fashion. He goes from thinking on a woman he had met, to the theatre. Each jump is a surprise and introduces a new facet to his life. Nadja seems less like a cohesive narrative than it does an exploration on Breton's experiences and the idea of obsession and the surreal. The author gives us glimpses of Paris, of people, of places, without offering too much commentary on what each means to him. The emotional aspect of the piece is allowed to be inferred or gathered through the pace and direction of the narrative. (Another aspect of this book that makes me think of nonfiction, the lyric essay, and memoir, is the author's honesty. Page 39: "I have always, beyond belief, hoped to meet, at night and in a woods, a beautiful naked woman...")
I especially liked the parenthetical paragraph on pages 49-51, where it seems as if the author is trying to understand a disconnected event (the balloon falling) by exploring a dream (and the subsequent disconnected events).
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