The Lighted Burrow

"At a distance, death becomes so inconsequential. I'm not scared of death. Then I'll rest and sleep. Ah, how well I'll stretch out, how well I'll sleep! Listen, I've begun to write a novel." This is how Max Blecher tells Mihail Sebastian that he is working on a book, the one that will be his final book, the one which, as Blecher biographer and scholar Doris Mironescu describes in the introduction, "is where Blecher formulates his declaration of war against the idea of the logical coherence of reality, not from the position of a marginalized being frustrated by his own failure, but as an individual who, because of the disease, has the advantage of looking beyond the shell of things, beyond the glistening peel called 'life'."