Erg Moeilijke literatuur vanwege een Existentieel surreëel schrijven. Veel abstracte beeldvorming met stereoscopische beelden die dan convergeren zodat 'ik' mijn eigen identiteit weervind...
Erg traag lezen, overdenken én meermaals lezen. ( )

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

Sterk, hypnotiserend begin dat vaak aan Bruno Schulz doet denken, maar toch iets te verdichtend en expressionistisch om te blijven beklijven. Wel benieuwd naar 'Gelittekende harten'. Puike vertaling uit het Roemeens van Jan H. Mysjkin. ( )

De Roemeense kritiek linkte Blecher aan Franz Kafka en Bruno Schulz. Mysjkin linkt hem aan André Breton en Michel Leiris. Roderick Six aan Ruimten rondom van Georges Perec. Zelf voeg ik daar graag Proust en vooral De aantekeningen van Malte Laurids Brigge van Rilke aan toe. Het lijkt er op dat elke lezer van Avonturen in de alledaagse onwerkelijkheid bijzonder gretig is hem blijvend bij te schrijven in de eigen leesgeschiedenis. Terecht, volkomen terecht …

Het boek is – net als de eerste 100 pagina’s van Rilke, net als zovele pagina’s van Proust – één hypnotiserend kluwen van zinnen, die je met de neus op het bestaan (of onbestaan) van alle zekerheden en twijfels, zo talrijk aanwezig of schreeuwerig afwezig in je leven of dromen, duwen. Een zelfhulpboek, bijna, dat je er aan herinnert dat je in het beste geval onmachtig, te eenzaam, kwetsbaar, menselijk of onbeduidend, bent om boven de banaliteit uit te stijgen en je toch, in één en dezelfde beweging laat applaudisseren, of toch minstens glimlachen, om zoveel onmacht. ( )

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 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. ( )