Max Blecher, born in 1909 into a Jewish family in Romania, contracted tuberculosis of the spine at 19. Despite his illness, he wrote steadily and carried on an intense correspondence with many important intellectuals and philosophers of the time, including André Breton, André Gide, and Martin Heidegger. He died in 1937 at the age of 28, leaving a work of surreal beauty and force, in the vein of Kafka, Proust and Bruno Schulz. His condition, besides his literary genius, might have partially fueled his distinct inclination to minute, in depth observation of the passage of time, and the daily epiphanies of the physical body cocooned by the surrounding space in multiple layers of sensations and emotions. Blecher’s style is alchemical, bringing forth the enthralling quest for a synchronized method of perception of all levels of experience. Under the spell of his writing, objects are brought to life, reality as we know it disintegrates, while the unseen becomes palpable matter, and the reader reaches a deep mindful state of wonder.
Michael Henry Heim (1943-2012) is considered one of America’s greatest literary translators. Working with great Czech, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, French, Italian, German and Dutch authors, he won numerous awards, including the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize, the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and the PEN Translation Prize. He learned Romanian in order to translate Max Blecher and was himself ill while embarking on this process. The quality of the prose of the English translation testifies to a unique bond and rare encounter between two great minds, the writer and the translator.
"When you read his books it's hard to believe your eyes. The author of this masterpiece was a twenty-five-year-old already weakened by disease, but Blecher's words don't merely describe the objects―they dig their talons into the things and hoist them high." -- Herta Müller
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