Nadja

André Breton

Grove Press, 1960 - Fiction - 160 pages

"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 teh 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 naja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. "The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as "not so much a thing as a way things happen, " Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.

Contents

• I: 21
• III: 22
• IV: 25
• V: 26
• VI: 29
• VII: 30
• VIII: 33
• IX: 34
• X: 35
• XII: 36
• XIII: 43
• XIV: 44
• XV: 47
• XVI: 53
• XVII: 54
• XVIII: 57
• XIX: 58
• XX: 75
• XXI: 81
• XXII: 82
• XXIII: 87
• XXIV: 88
• XXVI: 95
• XXVII: 96
• XXIX: 103
• XXX: 104
• XXXI: 109
• XXXIII: 110
• XXXIV: 117
• XXXV: 119
• XXXVI: 120
• XXXVII: 123
• XXXIX: 124
• XL: 125
• XLI: 126
• XLII: 127
• XLIII: 128
• XLIV: 131
• XLV: 132
• XLVI: 133
• XLVII: 134
• XLVIII: 137
• XLIX: 149

About the author

Andre Breton was born in Normandy, France on 19, 1896 and died on September 28, 1966. Breton was a poet, novelist, philosophical essayist, and art critic. He is considered to be the father of surrealism. From World War I to the 1940s, Breton was at the forefront of the numerous avant-garde activities that centered in Paris. Breton's influence on the art and literature of the twentieth century has been enormous. Picasso, Derain, Magritte, Giacometti, Cocteau, Eluard, and Gracq are among the many whose work was affected by his thinking. From 1927 to 1933, Breton was a member of the Communist party, but thereafter he opposed communism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme) of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism". He also wrote Nadja in 1928. Breton died in 1966 at 70 and was buried in the Cimetière des Batignolles in Paris. Richard Joseph Howard was born in Cleveland, Ohio on October 13, 1929. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1951 and a master's degree in 1952. He studied at the Sorbonne as a Fellow of the French Government in 1952-1953. He briefly worked as a lexicographer, but soon turned his attention to poetry and poetic criticism. His works include Trappings: New Poems; Like Most Revelations: New Poems; Selected Poems; No Traveler; Findings; Alone with America; and Quantities. He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1969 for Untitled Subjects. He is also a translator and published more than 150 translations from the French. He received the PEN Translation Prize in 1976 for his translation of E. M. Cioran's A Short History of Decay and the American Book Award for his 1983 translation of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. In 1982, he was named a Chevalier of L'Ordre National du Mérite by the government of France. He taught in the Writing Division of the School of the Arts, Columbia University. He died on March 31, 2022, in Manhattan, at the age of 92.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Nadja; Evergreen book; Evergreen original
• Author: André Breton
• Translated by: Richard Howard
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Grove Press, 1960
• ISBN: 0802150268, 9780802150264
• Length: 160 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Absurdist; Fiction / General; Fiction / Literary