Max Blecher (1909–1938)

In his preface to this slim volume, Andrei Codrescu mentions that Michael Henry Heim, who is renowned for his translations from a number of Easter European languages, learned Romanian specifically to translate Blecher. And knowing that the translator himself was ill when translating this work, brought home to me the almost organic bond between the writer and the translator. This bond certainly informs the quality of the prose: masterfully crafted and deeply felt.

Max Blecher is one of those show more shooting stars in the literary sky: to avoid the usual comparisons, let's say, he was like Stig Dagerman, or the Swiss writer Fritz Zorn, who were gifted with unusual lucidity and died prematurely, or like Joe Bousquet, the French writer paralyzed as a result of being wounded in war and who, like Blecher, wrote confined in bed. Reviewers notoriously compare Blecher to Proust or Kafka, although I find these comparisons to be overused to the point of being meaningless: like Kafka because he may represent an absurd aspect of reality or present reality with a sensibility that manages to get under the skin of things; like Proust because he raises the questions of memory (or that he raises it through the use of modern optical devices)... Although if I had to compare his writing style to anything, Maurice Blanchot would spring to mind before Proust or Kafka. But why compare at all? Aren't all these comparisons a way of denying his uniqueness? I suppose, from a distance, all stars look alike, but the difference is in how they allow us to navigate through life.

The character portrayed in Adventures in Immediate Irreality seems to lack the protective outer layer, he experiences the world in a raw, visceral manner; the contours of his existence are fluid, they can be penetrated by the objects and spaces around him, making his identity and perception of the world vacillate. He calls this sensory overload his crises. The slightest detail will trigger a flood of meaning. "Once during a crisis the sun sent a small cascade of rays onto the wall like a golden artificial lake dappled with glittering waves. I also saw the corner of a bookcase of large, leather-bound volumes behind glass. And in the end these true-to-life details, perceived from the distance of my swoon, stupefied and stunned me like a last gulp of chloroform. It was the most humdrum and familiar in the objects that disturbed me most." Despite the superficial similarity, these experiences are more like Bataille's blue of noon than Proust's experience of awakening in an unfamiliar room: the narrator essentially experiences the world as catastrophe camouflaged by surface appearances among which most people live out their lives. He presages the shattering of this world of appearance that World War II was going to be (and which he did not live to see), but more essentially he senses the catastrophe that is contained within the fabric of the world, and the tentative nature of reality as we know it. Once the instability of the real, supported by everyday objects and social structures, reveals itself, what remains is vertigo. show less

I've been trying to put together some thoughts, and it's tricky.

I mean, one could go the obvious way and say that it's a direct descendant of the proto-existential (or whatever) writers of the late 19th/early 20thc, the guys who walked around every major old world city thinking about their lives and their situations and the lack of god and the pressures of self and all that stuff, from Notes Of Underground through Hunger and Doctor Glas right up to The Trial and The Blind Owl (and on to show more Orbitór - I'm pretty sure Cartarescu has worn out quite a few copies of Blecher). A young boy grows up in a Romanian town, tries to figure out how the world works, how other people work, how his own body works (especially around the opposite sex), etc. We've seen that before.

Except that's not really what the novel does. There's something truly spooky about this book, and I haven't really managed to nail it down on one read. Our narrator doesn't come to any revelations, doesn't declare "And then I realised my boyhood was over and I had become... a man". Blecher's narrator observes everything, in minute detail, walking through his life like a HD camera (operated by a really good photographer) but where others would try to imbue objects with meaning he just returns to the form, the surface. It's less a novel about growing up than it is one about growing in. In a very physical sense; he's practically brainfucking everything he sees - not to impregnate it, but to catch it. (I'm sure someone's written something on the effect of tuberculosis on European literature; Torgny Lindgren, who survived TB as a child, has said that he's basically been able to call on that feel of feverish hyperclarity when writing ever since; Blecher, of course, wasn't so lucky.)

...for a moment I realised that the world could have existed in a realer reality, a positive structure of its cavities, so that everything that was hollow would bulge and reliefs would be identically shaped holes, without content, like the fragile, bizarre fossils trapped in stone that show tracks of shells or leaves that have been eroded away by time and only left fine imprints of their contours.
In a world like that humans wouldn't be multicoloured, fleshy growths full of complicated organs that could rot, but pure emptiness floating like air bubbles in water, in the entire universe's warm, soft matter.

Once you've read the author bio on the back flap - Blecher wrote this when he was 27, he was already bedridden with tuberculosis, he died shortly afterwards, and then... well, you know what happened to Romanian Jews after that, it's hard not to let that colour the novel.

Now I struggle in reality, I scream, I beg and beg to wake, to wake to another life, my real life. (...) All around, exact reality drags me further down and wants to undo me.

Or to read it through the lens of 19th century Europe dying, all the old truths dying, leaving us air bubbles to be filled with something else... Or maybe that's doing exactly the sort of thing the novel itself seems to reject.

"This is your life - nothing else", says the memory, and those words encompass this world's unfathomable nostalgia, enclosed in its hermetic lights and colours, from which no single life can extract more than a picture of an exact banality.

So, like this: Adventures In Immediate Unreality is a spooky, beautiful, haunting (and haunted) novel. I'm not sure I like it. I just know I need to read it again before long. show less

Um livro desconcertante escrito por um jovem que questiona a realidade, a noção de prazer, e terror. Com passagens muito bonitas, outras sombrias e até surrealistas. O livro navega por uma certa realidade irreal tal como é vivida pelo personagem. Seus prazeres, seus medos e suas experiências são todas narradas quase como sonhos ou imaginados com detalhes intrigantes e angustiantes. Merece ser lido com um lápis na mão para marcar as passagens que mais nos impactam.

Imagine if someone told you their dreams, and it was not excruciating.