Friday, April 6, 2012

Andre Breton - Nadja

So next month I promised we'd do Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, but I know I'm going to be (again) hard pressed for time finishing off term papers, so I thought I'd postpone Nabokov to June and do Andre Breton's Nadja next month, a book I know quite well and can be read in a matter of hours. We've been discussing the relative merits/demerits of surrealism lately, so we might as well go to the source! Discussion is May 13th at 7 PM.


Nadja, originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written, a book which defined that movement's attitude toward everyday life.The principal narrative is an account of the author's relationship with a girl in the city of Paris, the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life. The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work--pictures of various 'surreal' people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in Nadja's presence and which inspire him to meditate on their reality or lack of it.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780802150264