Miroslav Blecher was a Romanian writer of Jewish heritage whose work is deeply marked by his prolonged struggle with severe illness. Despite his physical confinement, he forged a remarkable literary career, exploring themes of reality, perception, and the human condition. His prose, often drawn from his experiences undergoing lengthy sanatorium treatments, is distinguished by its introspective depth and poetic language. Blecher left an indelible mark on Romanian literature, with his writings valued for their unflinching honesty and artistic power.
Transparent Body & Other Texts brings together Blecher's entire output of poetry and short prose, from the earliest texts published during his lifetime to those appearing for the first time only recently. They range from stories in the vein of his fantastical, hallucinatory longer work to aphorisms, reportage, and notebook fragments. The volume also includes a selection of his correspondence with such major figures of Romanian interwar modernism as Geo Bogza, Ilarie Voronca, and Saşa Pană to give a fuller picture of Blecher's engagement with the avant-garde and literary life even as his health was progressively deteriorating over the course of the 1930s.
Max Blecher began writing The Illuminated Burrow in 1937 and continued working on it until his death the following spring, but its full version was only published posthumously in 1971. It was the final "novel" in what can be called a trilogy that includes Adventures in Immediate Irreality and Scarred Hearts, and like those, it is composed in the vein of the Surrealist auto-fiction reminiscent of the work of André Breton and Michael Leiris. Set in the sanatoria where Blecher received treatment for spinal tuberculosis, the ostensible narrator is forced to confront the power and limitations of memory as he attempts to capture a dying man's last moments of life as they pass "like ash ... through a sieve," one final effort to rescue the beauty of days spent straddling the boundary between waking and dreaming, encountering the marvelous both inside and outside the sanatorium's walls, wandering deserted gardens, or experiencing transient yet affecting connections with fellow patients. As his physical powers decline and he is permanently confined to a bed, the narrator's life migrates to his inner consciousness, an "illuminated burrow" where reality is indistinguishable from fantasy, where the surreal and the mundane seamlessly fuse to enact the fears and fascinations elicited by the vibrant world that is gradually slipping away.
"Scarred Hearts is a masterpiece. . . . It is a book to live with, to read again and again, as only great literature demands us to."—Paul Bailey "Elegant and powerful."—Financial Times "It is a matter for rejoicing that this small masterpiece should survive to delight readers of another century."—Daily Telegraph It is Paris in the 1930s and Emanuel, a Romanian student, finds himself dangerously ill with spinal tuberculosis. Sent to a sanatorium near the coast, he remains wrapped in a full body cast for a year. But while he endures his terrible cure, he unexpectedly falls in love.
