book data
700 ratings,
3.70
average rating, 74 reviews
(more data...)
edit
published
January 11th 1960
(first published 1928)
by Grove Press
binding
Paperback, 160 pages
isbn
0802150268
(isbn13: 9780802150264)
description
Nadja, originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's att...more
Sign in to Goodreads to see your friends' reviews of this book.
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Next Best Boo...: OFFICIAL SPRING CHALLENGE - 2009 | 6462 | 7309 | 20 days ago, 02:57PM | |
| I Love Lists: Barthelme's Syllabus | 11 | 388 | 01/14/2009 12:35AM |
friend reviews
To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
other reviews (showing 1-20 of 1,113)
All ratings
|
5 stars (185)
|
4 stars (213)
|
3 stars (227)
|
2 stars (60)
|
1 star (15)
|
avg 3.70
editions: all | this edition
editions: all | this edition
Read in February, 2009
recommends it for:
introverted lovers
More a treatise on how to be ghostly than anything else, Nadja is Andre Breton’s highly wrought elaboration of his brief relationship with a mysterious (possibly mad?) young woman. For those with a taste for, or an interest in, coincidences (as I am), this book can be highly intoxicating and actually mind altering, meaning it can have a direct effect on how and what you see as you go about your days and nights walking around (preferably through a city with “atmosphere”). This intoxication ...more
Like this review?
yes
(1 person liked it)
add a comment
Read in September, 2007
This book was extremely hard to jump into. The sentences are convoluted with all sorts of subordinate clauses and whackiness. For instance:
"Over and above the various prejudices I acknowledge, the affinities I feel, the attractions I succumb to, the events which occur to me and to me alone--over and above a sum of movements I am conscious of making, of emotions I alone experience--I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference ...more
"Over and above the various prejudices I acknowledge, the affinities I feel, the attractions I succumb to, the events which occur to me and to me alone--over and above a sum of movements I am conscious of making, of emotions I alone experience--I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference ...more
Like this review?
yes
(1 person liked it)
add a comment
Read in May, 2008
Though an invaluable resource, wikipedia is at best prosaic and sometimes just dreary. The summary "...based on Breton's interactions with an actual young woman (Nadja) over the course of 10 days, and is taken to be a semi-autobiographical description of his relationship with a mad patient..." fails to convey a scrap of the dreamlike poetry of the book, which combines surrealist dissociative fragments, a straightforward and non-judgemental description of interactions between two unusua...more
Like this review?
yes
(1 person liked it)
add a comment
Read in March, 2006
recommends it for:
dreamy people
Nadja is a (daresay feminist) psycho-surrealist account of Breton's meeting with the titled character, Nadja. The meeting encompasses only 20 or so pages of the novella, but it influences everything in the book, even before he meets her. Full of beautiful and complex ideas and imagery with black and white photographs accompanying to secure this dream into some sense of the reader's reality.
Breton searches and finds and searches but not in progression. Is Nadja just another blip in Breto...more
Breton searches and finds and searches but not in progression. Is Nadja just another blip in Breto...more
Like this review?
yes
(1 person liked it)
add a comment
Very frustrating, very experimental. Breton kept slamming himself up against the wall of human experience by trying to capture the strangeness what he saw/felt/heard in a single moment, particularly when it came to the Uncanny. His disconnect from the object and its meaning led him to compulsively try to capture his experience through text and photograph. Breton (poor Freud) kept redefining the Uncanny , so there's my best attempt at an explanation in this context. Of course, its a lucky man ...more
Like this review?
yes
(1 person liked it)
add a comment
Read in September, 2006
recommends it for:
surreal, love
the man who wrote the surrealist manifesto and the defined leader of the parisian 20s and 30s. this was a difficult read. the first part is thoughts, essay, detatchment, surreal literature. the second part is like a diary. following his days and people and events thoughout paris during 1928? but then he meets the woman nadja. who is the inspiration for the modern woman, individualistic, absolutely free. but is she real or just a concept? i know this much, she was hailed by Simone de Beauvoir as ...more
Like this review?
yes
(1 person liked it)
add a comment
Read in May, 2005
We must leave the book, and as "Nadja and Breton", we walk through the streets of Paris ...
" It may be that life needs to be decoded as a cryptogram". The encounter with these words during my reading was surprising.
"Nadja" is a reflection of surrealist thought and is characterized by his innovative speech.
Reading " The Manifeste of Surrealism " by André Breton is a good introduction to discover this master of Surrealism.
...more
" It may be that life needs to be decoded as a cryptogram". The encounter with these words during my reading was surprising.
"Nadja" is a reflection of surrealist thought and is characterized by his innovative speech.
Reading " The Manifeste of Surrealism " by André Breton is a good introduction to discover this master of Surrealism.
...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Well, I had some reasonably high expectations for this one. I happen to worship the band that named itself after the book, and so when I read that it was a bizarre French surrealist novel, I decided that I needed to get my hands on it (no matter how much of a pain it was).
What I found was a book that demanded a whole lot from the reader without much reward. The sentence structure is confusing to the point of almost being unreadable - it's rhythmic at times, making the reading itself ...more
What I found was a book that demanded a whole lot from the reader without much reward. The sentence structure is confusing to the point of almost being unreadable - it's rhythmic at times, making the reading itself ...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Read in July, 2005
recommends it for:
surrealists, sexists
If I were a man living in the 40s, I would have been Andre Breton. And I would give myself only three stars for Nadja, but it would have had fun writing it.
Like this review?
yes
(1 person liked it)
add a comment
Andre Breton was a misogynist douche and this novel proves it.
Still, the book wasn't completely lacking in value or merit. The pictures were nice.
Still, the book wasn't completely lacking in value or merit. The pictures were nice.
Like this review?
yes
(1 person liked it)
5 comments
01/19/09
Catherine
marked it as to-read
Conde Nast Traveler top 69 fiction travel booksBreton's work of high surrealism, about a Parisian psychiatric patient with a serious identity crisis, has inspired many writers, including Jesse Ball. "Of books that circle Paris, that define it, that lay it on a thin spoon beside a dram of poison, there are a few," he says. "This book invests it with a great feeling of life, of chance—the whispering of curtains, footsteps, lights in the street, the calling out of voices in the nig...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Surrealism was Breton's cross to bear and "Nadja" is considered a difficult yet essential surrealist work. This novella is about a young man's romance with a woman who might be considered a clairvoyant with a borderline personality disorder. Keeping with the tenets of Surrealism, the characters have autobigraphical elememnts that, for some, add an eerie realism to this tale of mad love. Breton was a proponent of automatic writing which produced a stream-of-consciousness style that is p...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Has a copy to sell/swap
—
Read in November, 2006
recommends it for:
sleepwalkers, urbanists
I just started thumbing through this again, and thought I'd post it to see who else has read it. I found this at a thrift store for 25 cents. I was attracted by the cover and I had been interested in reading Breton. I read it a year later during a week of late nights while I was unemployed. I would lie on a sofa a few feet from my stereo's speakers, playing drone and ambient music, while I read this by dim lamplight. Definitely the best way to read this.
Breton's narration is c...more
Breton's narration is c...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Read in June, 2008
recommended to El by:
1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (192/1001)
Self-styled leader of the Surrealist movement, Andre Breton narrates here his experience in Paris in the 1920s, specifically his experiences surrounding the "siren", Nadja - a name chosen for herself as it is the begining of the word hope in Russian (nadejat'sja). Nadja is an enigma to Breton and she challenges his way of looking at life in general. The semi-autobiographical story is told in a typical Surrealist manner - vaguely dream-like, heavy on the symbolism, etc. The progressi...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
01/30/08
Lynn
added it
I recently picked Nadja up for the second time. The first time, I had read it looking for fiction inspired by cities. I expected, and found, a story about Paris. The narrator's mad desire for Nadja who is herself quite mad is punctuated by the thoroughly plain unpeopled photographs of the city. Breton's descriptions of the city's streets are luminous and they play off the fuzzy, gaussian blur of the pictures. What's the connection between these two worlds: the literary and the graphic? The conne...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Read in March, 2008
I thought this started promisingly with some interesting ideas outlining Breton's stated approach, foregrounding the author as the 'object' of the world around him, rather than world-shaper, as in the classical novel. The episodic structure introduced in the section of 'test' anecdotes of city life and the very effective use of photography (the images serve to make the text more ambiguous, rather than clarifying it as you might expect) are all very innovatory and set things up nicely for Nadja's...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
همه چیز را می دانم از بس سعی کردم بخوانم جویبار اشکهایم را
هر انسانی امید و گمان دارد از دنیای خودش بهتر باشد اما انکه بهتر است فقط بهتر از سایرین همین دنیا را بیان می کند
هر انسانی امید و گمان دارد از دنیای خودش بهتر باشد اما انکه بهتر است فقط بهتر از سایرین همین دنیا را بیان می کند
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Read in January, 2001
recommends it for:
Surrealist Fans, Love fans, Dream Fans
So, I had this dream the other night. I was on a jungle island, looking out to a cloudy ocean. All of a sudden, a huge black shape rose out of the sea. What at first looked like a ship turned out to be the wicker-like black skeleton of a giant, old-fashioned sewing machine. Almost immediately after this event, I became engaged in a one-on-one knife fight with a shark! The shark had only it's razor-like teeth. I won the fight: to do so, I had to hold on to the narrow, shaky bamboo bridge w...more
recommends it for:
Art movement enthusiasts
You can read this book in a sitting if you want. It's a little bit sad. Surrealist poet becomes obsessed with a young woman, writes about her for a while, and then laments the fact that she is committed to an institution and loses her mind completely. It has pictures and drawings scattered throughout, which is still sort of taboo in terms of serious reading, despite Breakfast of Champions. If you like rock music, you will like Nadja even more because Patti Smith quotes it on the back of Radi...more
Like this review?
yes
2 comments
quotes from this book
"Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks, many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one <i>Shock</i>, which does...The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph...Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all."
More quotes...
groups with this book
