I think for anyone who’s familiar with the manic pixie dream girl trope, André Breton’s Nadja stands out as an obvious example- the girl you can never have, the girl of your dreams, the girl who’s too damaged to be loved, etc. A prime example- when Breton asks Nadja who she is on page 71, she replies “I am the soul in limbo”. How intriguing, how arcane and captivating she is! No wonder Breton was so entranced. Although there’s more to this book than Breton’s apparent obsession with her, this definitely is an overarching theme, and can be hard to get past at times. We’ve all seen it happen in popular media, and even sometimes in reality- a guy becomes suddenly infatuated with a strange and elusive woman, they begin spending all their time together and having deep, meaningful conversations (usually accompanied by sex), only for things to end abruptly when the mysterious outer layer is peeled back and things, so to speak, get real. Breton’s fleeting yet passionate relationship with Nadja reflects this common trope, but there are definitely more layers to this novel that are worth delving into.

For starters, the first sixty pages of Nadja discuss events and topics completely separate from her, and we are not introduced to her character until after this first exploration of Breton’s thoughts. I appreciated Breton’s search for meaning within his work and elsewhere, which he describes as concerned with “facts that present all the appearances of a signal, without being able to say precisely which signal” (p.19). In this first section of the novel, Breton presents a number of seemingly unrelated, often mundane events, in an attempt to express their meaning to him. It feels in many ways like a wander through his thoughts, as if he’s trying to make sense of them as he writes. These range from his apparent puzzlement over the play Les Detraqueés, and the strange dream that ensues, to his fixation on a woman’s blue glove at the Centrale Surréaliste. Breton portrays these moments as “truly unforeseen” (p.59) occurrences, and claims to find significant meaning in these small, unpredictable events, rather than “premeditated, continuously applied actions” (p.59) such as work, which he condemns.

Given that Nadja is a surrealist text and written in a style largely unfamiliar to me, I found certain passages to be quite opaque and found myself spending a lot of time pondering over their meaning. This didn’t make the reading experience unenjoyable- in fact, I quite liked having to stop and think about Breton’s intention behind the words, trying to put the pieces together. Honestly, I feel like there is A LOT more to say and unpack about this novel that I don’t have the space to write about here, so I’m looking forward to talking more about it in class. Overall, I thought it was quite an entertaining read and found it had some pretty amusing moments.

My question- what did you think of the portrayal of Nadja? Did she remind you of any  female love interests in popular media?