Adventures in Immediate Irreality by Max Blecher, translated by Michael Henry Heim
Published by New Direction, 2015
Also available from the University of Plymouth Press as Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth
From the publisher:
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 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 very young man.
From reviews:
• Andrei Codrescu, The Paris Review
Max Blecher’s Adventures in Immediate Irreality, newly reissued, is not a memoir, a novel, or a poem, though it has been called all those names, and compared rightly with the works of Proust and Kafka. Blecher belongs in that company for the density and lyrical force of his writing, but he is also a recording diagnostician of a type the twentieth century had not yet fully birthed, but the twenty-first is honoring in the highest degree….
There is an inverted nostalgia here, a nostalgia for the present that has already taken hold of the writer, who is composing both his own and his decade’s epitaph. Blecher, like Proust, endows places and objects from the past with the ability to project an independent existence more real than the present. This world hides another, open only to the genius of child wonder and adolescent desire.
• Cory Johnston, The Literary Review
Adventures in Immediate Irreality is a novel that fundamentally takes nothing for granted. Every object and interaction that the narrator casts his eye upon is muddy with doubt and uncertainty; this extends even to his own humanity.
It is, essentially an autobiographical account of Blecher’s own life but what an account! It is full of wonderful, Surrealist-influenced images and an account of an ordinary life made less ordinary. We follow the unnamed boy as he drifts around an unnamed Romanian town, mainly in summer.
• Eric Foley, Numero Cinq Magazine
The miracle of Blecher’s writing is the miracle of literature itself: that strange human endeavor that always must occur in “the immediate irreality.
