Okay, so going into Nadja, I really thought things would finally get easier after Proust. Like surely that was the hardest one, right? Wrong. While Nadja was technically easier to get through, I still spent most of the book feeling confused and slightly unwell in a \u201cwhat am I even reading right now?\u201d kind of way. The whole thing feels scattered, like Breton just dumped his thoughts onto the page and said \u201cfigure it out.\u201d There\u2019s barely a plot, time doesn\u2019t seem to matter, and I kept waiting for something to fully click. It mostly didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
The book starts with the classic \u201cWho am I?\u201d which immediately made me think, okay, this is going to be philosophical. Fair enough. But as I kept reading, it didn\u2019t feel like he was actually trying to answer that question. Instead, it felt like we were just bouncing between random encounters, dreams, coincidences, and long reflections that may or may not mean something. At some point, I gave up trying to track a storyline and just accepted that confusion might be part of the experience. Not saying I loved that, but I survived.<\/p>\n
I will say, one thing I genuinely liked was the images in the book. Nadja\u2019s drawings were especially interesting and a little unsettling in a way that worked. Seeing them made the book feel more immersive and helped me understand the vibe of what Breton was describing, instead of just feeling confused all the time.<\/p>\n
Now let\u2019s talk about Andr\u00e9 and Nadja, because\u2026 yikes. Their relationship made me deeply uncomfortable. Nadja feels incredibly vulnerable and clearly not grounded in reality, while Andr\u00e9 seems fully aware of that and still keeps seeing her. On top of that, he\u2019s married. The whole thing feels less romantic and more like he\u2019s observing her as some sort of fascinating experiment. I mostly just felt bad for Nadja, especially when it becomes obvious how alone she really is.<\/p>\n
Overall, Nadja was strange, uncomfortable, and confusing, but not completely uninteresting. I wouldn\u2019t say I enjoyed it, and I definitely wouldn\u2019t choose to read more surrealist literature for fun, but I can at least appreciate how different it was. Even if that difference mostly left me asking, \u201cWhat did I just read?\u201d It was for sure better than Proust in specific ways though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Okay, so going into Nadja, I really thought things would finally get easier after Proust. Like surely that was the hardest one, right? Wrong. While Nadja was technically easier to get through, I still spent most of the book feeling confused and slightly unwell in a \u201cwhat am I even reading right now?\u201d kind of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107038,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,3,4],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-andre-breton","tag-nadja","tag-novel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/asmasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/asmasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/asmasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/asmasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107038"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/asmasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/asmasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/asmasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions\/13"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/asmasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/asmasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/asmasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}