Articles Available Online

I’d like to introduce you to a book, an impressive book that no one read when it first came out in Romania in 1936 or later when it was reissued in 1970: Adventures in Immediate Irreality by M Blecher And when the first German edition appeared, which wasn’t until 1990 in a translation by Ernest Wichner, no one read that either, even though few books published in Germany since 1990 could compare with Blecher’s novel for sheer literary intensity But perhaps that’s why the book never attracted a wider audience?   In order to convince you, I’d like to let the book speak for itself   ‘The crowds, making the rounds, would pass from zone to zone, bright lights to darkness, like the moon in my geography book’ is how Blecher describes people visiting a fair And no other sentence better describes his own text The external plot isn’t easy to describe – it’s really the ongoing reflection of an interior narrative, a manic inner monologue written in the first person, in which the narrator’s striving for self-assurance becomes a confession This narrator is a nameless adolescent roaming through the summer heat of a small town He has no goal whatsoever, he is searching, as Blecher says, for the correspondence between himself and the waxwork panopticon of places, people, and objects set in the world The search produces emotional upheavals that he calls crises, which all come from the ‘terrible question of who I actually am’ – a question whose answer ‘requires a lucidity more basic and profound than that of the brain’ In the words of Blecher’s narrator: ‘And I have returned implacably to the surface of things … Never, under no other circumstances, have I felt so clearly as in moments like these when every object must occupy the place it occupies and I must be the person I am’   Places, persons, objects – and this vagabond narrator that speaks of himself so perplexingly and so intriguingly that it goes far beyond being ‘a complete stranger’ to himself Because what this person says about himself goes beyond what even a person might