Nadja

An original book, difficult to compare with other books written before it (with the possible exception of Baudelaire's works). I disliked its contingent character: although the author turns Nadja into a symbol of forthcoming Revolution, their relationship is rather trivial, ordinary & un-essential. Perhaps the description of the “affair” is written in a style devoid of any passion to emulate a sort of Hegelian objectivity: the tone becomes cold, impersonal. Therefore, Nadja's paradoxical classicism, remarked by so many critics. I have loved Breton's anti-psychiatrical manifesto from the end (written with guilt and ambivalence, as his editor observes), which opens the way for Artaud, Foucault and Deleuze.

“whatevs man” (george bataille, 193X)