The Unknown Masterpiece: Why You Should Rush to Read Max Blecher

I have allowed myself to use the title of the news by Honoré de Balzac to head my article on the Romanian Jew Max Blecher (1909-1938) because, as I read him –admired–, I was overcome by the impression of finding myself before a masterpiece by an author –I need to admit– of whom, until recently, I had not. How do you explain Mr. Sam Abrams In the prologue, this one from 1936 is the first title of a trilogy that they completed Scarred hearts (1937) and Enlightened Falls. Sanatorium Diary, a work that the author finished before his death, but which was not published until 1971. Literature lovers should not miss this gem!

Events in immediate reality Perhaps it's not very inviting to historical reading, but it has at least one virtue: it sets out its philosophical ambition. The first chapter is, in this sense, the most difficult, but also the most programmatic. We might say we're reading one of those existentialist novels that use a more or less conventional plot to expose problems of transcendental gravity and dimension. Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre, let's say (more than not) The foreigner, by Albert Camus). The surprise is that Sartre published his best-known work in 1938, the same year that Blecher passed away, due to a serious illness, at the premature age of 29.

A novel of 'deformation'

"Who am I exactly?" asks the nameless protagonist of the play. And, throughout his life, we witness the strangeness that his condition as a living being causes him, now and before. It is, in fact, an insoluble strangeness in the face of the reality that surrounds him (in the face of "the ordinary appearance of things") and in the face of his own elusive identity. Young, fragile-looking, and sickly in nature, he suffers a series of crises that seem to temporarily distance him from the world—a world devoid of meaning. If my memory serves me correctly, Roquentin, the Sartrean character, suffered a severe crisis next to a chestnut tree in an urban park. For the man, the tree suddenly acquired another condition, vaguely human (things of existential contingency). Well, curiously, Blecher's favorite trees are chestnut trees, and there is a moment when his character also suffers from this. feels tree. On the other hand, the relationship the boy maintains with objects seems to precede that which the Sartrian protagonist will later maintain.

Rather than a coming-of-age novel, we should refer to it as a fragmentary novel of deformation: The protagonist knows he cannot move forward. He understands sexual desire and enjoys its company, but suffers even more from its disappointment. Faced with familiar objects he hasn't had at hand for a long time, he relives "the melancholy of [...] childhood and that essential nostalgia for the uselessness of the world." ("Uselessness of the World": want a more transparent existentialist proclamation?) He admires madmen because they have shaken off their servitude to reality (to its conventions, its narrow limits): they are freer than sensible people and, for that very reason, capable of feeling "the true breadth of the world." The boy is obsessed with a panopticon museum, full of wax figures. However, in the end, only the clay weighs, which is everywhere. And death, which permeates everything. "Ordinary words are not valid at a certain depth of the soul," he concludes. And yet, how well Max Blecher conveyed to us the hallucinatory images of his protagonist through words!