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    Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality
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    Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality
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    Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality
    Ebook290 pages4 hours

    Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality

    By UNIV PLYMOUTH and Anca Boeriu

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Max Blecher’s work of autobiographical fiction employs poetic prose to explore his ideas of self-identity and the body. An intimate and frank account, Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality is unsettling as it examines and lays bare what Blecher terms ‘the crisis of unreality’ in relation to the human condition and details the ‘bizarre adventure of being a man’ from the perspective of Blecher who never fully experienced manhood owing to his contraction of tuberculosis in 1928. What is offered to the reader then, is Blecher’s experiences of being a physically infirm adolescent experiencing the simultaneous struggle of social isolation and sexual awakening.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Plymouth Press
    Release dateDec 16, 2014
    ISBN9781841023434
    Unavailable
    Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality
    Author

    UNIV PLYMOUTH

    Max Blecher (1909 – 1938), poet and prose writer, offers a harrowing account of the “bizarre adventure of being a man” that draws upon his experience, in 1928, of being diagnosed with tuberculosis of the spine. He was treated in various sanatoria in France, Switzerland and Romania, but to no avail. Engagement with existentialist philosophy led to an interest in Surrealism. Without joining any particular grouping he corresponded with, among others, Geo Bogza, Mihail Sebastian, André Breton, André Gide, Martin Heidegger and Ilarie Voronca, and sporadically collaborated with the Paris-based magazines Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution and Les Feuillets inutiles.

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    Reviews for Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality

    4.5/5

    38 ratings2 reviews

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    • 5/5
      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.
    • 1/5
      I'm surprised that none of the other reviews mention the several instances of child sexual abuse described by the narrrator in chapters two and three. Whatever the book's literary merits may (or may not) be, and whether the narrator's experiences and actions are explained and contextualised later on, I don't think I want to read further.I can, perhaps, interpret for myself the "immediate irreality" the narrator describes as being a kind of trauma dissociation, but the story does not seems to be going in that direction, and I really don't feel like finding out at this point. I wish there had been some indication of the nature of this part of the story in the book description, as I could have just avoided it then.