In case you were worried, I am not writing about some future rom-com starring the latest pretty blonde actress, but rather Andre Breton’s meditation on… well, what?

On Jacqueline Lamba, a painter and also Breton’s second wife?

Sort of. But to my mind, not really.

Certainly, she is an object of desire. And that’s the real focus, desire and desire’s object. And sometimes, the fading of desire for the object.

Lamba is less clearly to focus here in Mad Love than the titular Nadja was the focus of Nadja. Mad Love is also much more autobiographical. In fact, it’s not a novel in the way Nadja is. It’s poetry, prose, prose poetry, and a running commentary on desire.

Certainly, it picks up where Nadja left off, with the convulsive nature of beauty.

But Lamba doesn’t even appear until a third of the way into the book. Before that, boding poorly for the couple’s future, Breton is walking with the sculptor Alberto Giacometti and suddenly Breton must purchase this spoon he finds in a market, but then later admits to losing most of his interest in it.

A short read and easier to understand than Nadja and more easily enjoyable to read than a full collection of his poetry, it’s a great introduction to the writing of the leading surrealist.

The forms range from the dreamy, gauzy prose of Nadja to more manifesto-like writing (he did write the two manifestos of the surrealist movement, after all) to actual poems inserted whole cloth within the book.

This bouncing between forms goes to the point of how this book is not about Lamba in the same way that Nadja was about Nadja. If I were to say what it is about, I would come down on the side of it being an aesthetic manifesto. Breton was always the most dogmatic of the surrealists, expelling from the movement those he felt betrayed the values and politics (surrealism was closely tied to the pro-communist left) set down (and generally set down by Breton), so it is hardly a surprise  that this work would so often take that form.