Nadja - Andre Breton (NYRB Classics)

Nadja by Andre Breton, translated by Mark Polizzotti / 160-page paperback published in 2025 by NYRB Classics / ISBN 9781681379364 *** A new translation of one of the defining works of the French surrealist movement, an energetic autobiographical novel that is at once both a tumultuous romance story and an initiation into the surrealism of everyday life. In Paris, during the fall of 1926, André Breton met a young woman from the provinces who called herself Nadja because, she said, "in Russian it's the beginning of the word for hope, and beacuse it's only the beginning." Their love affair was brief, intense, and intensely self-conscious. They both talked exuberantly of the book that Breton would make out of their days and nights. And indeed a year later (after Nadja was institutionalized and Breton had moved on to other love affairs) he began to write Nadja—a book of memory and analysis taking its cue in part from Freud's case studies, but also a book of ingeniously intercut images, dra