beer good
Well-Known Member
Max Blecher: Adventures in Immediate Unreality (Întâmplări în irealitate imediată, 1936)
So I read this book in december and 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 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.)
(All translations mine. Apologies to Blecher and his real translators.)
So I read this book in december and 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 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.)
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.
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.
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.
(All translations mine. Apologies to Blecher and his real translators.)
