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When I started reading Nadja, I honestly thought I was doing something wrong. I kept flipping pages, waiting for the moment where everything would click, where a storyline would emerge or where I’d finally understand what I was supposed to be paying attention to. That moment never really came. Instead, the book felt like being dropped into someone’s stream of consciousness and told to just… sit with it. No guide, no explanations, no clear purpose. At first, that made the experience incredibly frustrating.

This was my first real exposure to surrealist writing, and it definitely threw me off. I’m used to novels giving me something to hold onto: a plot, character development, or at least a sense of direction. Nadja offers none of that. The narration moves between chance encounters, wandering through Paris, philosophical reflections, and fragmented conversations that don’t seem to build toward anything concrete. It felt less like reading a novel and more like reading someone’s thoughts exactly as they appeared, unfiltered and unresolved.

As confusing as it was, I slowly started to realize that this discomfort wasn’t accidental. The more I read, the clearer it became that surrealism isn’t meant to be neat or satisfying. It resists structure on purpose. Breton focuses on coincidence, intuition, and moments that feel significant without explaining why. The lack of clarity started to feel intentional, as if the book wanted the reader to experience confusion rather than overcome it. Once I stopped expecting answers, the reading experience became slightly less painful, though still exhausting.

Nadja herself added another layer to this unease. She is unpredictable, emotional, and impossible to fully understand. Normally, when a book is named after a character, I expect some kind of insight into who they are. But Nadja remains distant and unknowable. We see her only through Breton’s perspective, and even then, she feels more like an idea than a person. This made me uncomfortable, especially because I kept wanting to understand her motivations, but the text refuses to provide that clarity.

Around the last part of the book, I stopped trying to read Nadja the way I normally would. I let go of the need to “get it” or find some clear message and instead paid attention to how the reading experience itself felt. Mostly, it left me feeling unsettled, disoriented, and a bit distant, like I was always one step behind what was happening. Looking back, that discomfort feels intentional. The novel doesn’t seem interested in being clear or accessible, rather it wants to throw the reader off balance and challenge what we expect a novel to do.

Still, reading Nadja took a lot out of me. It felt scattered, frustrating, and at times just exhausting to get through. Even though I can understand why it matters as a surrealist work, it’s not something I’d choose to read again, and I’m not exactly eager to seek out more books like it. I can acknowledge its purpose and impact without actually enjoying the experience and I think that reaction makes sense.