ever-fleeting Nadja

I’ve only known Surrealism as the art style, but that’s the exact way Breton’s writing made me feel as well. While Proust read at a slow pace and as though he was going in circles describing things going into levels of detail I did not feel were needed, I felt like I was riding a roller coaster of loops in Breton’s active thoughts in the time before he met Nadja. I would not be surprised if the man had ADHD, which was probably why I liked reading him so much in the beginning, my thoughts jitter around in quite the same way.

The characters we kept meeting that he’d encountered were also Surrealism actors and it felt like getting little cameos. I’m sure I did not know them all but people like Picasso and Duchamp showing up really blurred the lines for me between art, life, and fiction.

Nadja, from the beginning, seems fleeting. Airy-fairy, enough stories to fill a book, unable to be tied down much. I pictured her as a whimsical waif miscast for the situations she’s in. Breton treats her as a complete novelty, and the second she becomes real and emotionally demanding, he withdraws from her (definitely reminiscent of some aspects of modern-dating). I mean, he has a whole wife at home, the whole fling is already morally corrupt, I’m not sure how far it could really ever go.

Breton seemed lost himself, until finding Nadja, which pulled him down deeper for the brief affair they had, then he snapped out of it. I have to say, I don’t like him and how highly he thinks of himself and how highly yet disposable he thinks of her. “I have taken Nadja... for a free genius... As for her, I know that in every sense of the word, she takes me for a god, she thinks of me as the sun” (p.113). He says they both have such a pull to each other, but he’s the only one with any real power in the relationship. A bit of a narcissist I must say.

Completely unrelated to anything this book made me miss Paris more than anything and I am happy to know that Breton and I frequented many the same walks through the city. It definitely gave me anchor points within a novel that had few plot points.

I liked this book because I like Paris and I liked Nadja. She was color, life, art- surrealism, in an otherwise grey life of Breton, that’s how I saw it anyways, in black and white aside from her.