Often called “the Kafka of Romania,” Max Blecher died young but not before creating this incandescent novel.
Adventures in Immediate Irreality, the masterwork of the Romanian writer Max Blecher, vividly paints the crises of "irreality" that plagued him in his youth: eerie and unsettling mirages wherein he would glimpse future events. In gliding chapters that move with a peculiar dream logic of their own, this memoiristic novel sketches the tremulous, frightening, and exhilarating awakenings of a young man.

Adventures In Immediate Irreality

Literature & Fiction

Blecher, Max

Contemporary

New Directions

"Scarred Hearts is a masterpiece. . . . It is a book to live with, to read again and again, as only great literature demands us to."—Paul Bailey"Elegant and powerful."—Financial Times"It is a matter for rejoicing that this small masterpiece should survive to delight readers of another century."—Daily TelegraphIt is Paris in the 1930s and Emanuel, a Romanian student, finds himself dangerously ill with spinal tuberculosis. Sent to a sanatorium near the coast, he remains wrapped in a full body cast for a year. But while he endures his terrible cure, he unexpectedly falls in love.

Scarred Hearts

Literary

Old Street Publishing

Max Blecher began writing The Illuminated Burrow in 1937 and continued working on it until his death the following spring, but its full version was only published posthumously in 1971. It was the final “novel” in what can be called a trilogy that includes Adventures in Immediate Irreality and Scarred Hearts, and like those, its imaginative distortion of real experiences is reminiscent of Bruno Schulz as well as the Surrealist autofiction of André Breton and Michel Leiris. Set in the sanatoria where Blecher received treatment for spinal tuberculosis, the ostensible narrator is forced to confront the power and limitations of memory as he attempts to capture the last moments of life as they pass “like ash ... through a sieve,” one final effort to reclaim the beauty of days spent straddling the boundary between waking and dreaming, encountering the marvelous both inside and outside the sanatorium's walls, inside and outside his very body. As his physical powers decline and he becomes permanently bedridden, the narrator’s life migrates to his inner consciousness, an “illuminated burrow” where reality is indistinguishable from fantasy, where the surreal and the mundane seamlessly fuse to enact the fears and fascinations elicited by the vibrant world that is gradually slipping away.\nBlecher once explained his method: 
My ideal of writing would be to transpose into literature the high tension found in a Salvador Dalí painting. That cool dementia, perfectly legible and essential, is what I would like to achieve. Explosions that occur between the walls of the room and not at a distance between chimerical and abstract continents. ... Surrealism should hurt like a deep wound.

The Illuminated Burrow: A Sanatorium Journal

Twisted Spoon Press

Transparent Body & Other Texts

Essays & Correspondence

Acontecimientos en la irrealidad inmediata (Spanish Edition)

Classics

Independently published

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Blecher, Max. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Blecher, Max