The Illuminated Burrow by Max Blecher (review)

Abstract

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Reviewed by:

• The Illuminated Burrow by Max Blecher
• Allan Graubard (bio)

the illuminated burrow Max Blecher
Translated by Gabi Reigh
Twisted Spoon Press
https://www.twistedspoon.com/illuminated-burrow.html
166 pages; Print, $23.00

The intersection of illness and literature is a rich vein that authors have explored, I imagine, ever since we came to writing. Whatever its time and form, when the vulnerability of the body enters a narrative, the stakes intensify. We know the questions that come in response, too; we know them well enough, animating the page or those we ask straight out when faced with an illness: How did it happen? What's the diagnosis and treatment? How will this play out? What's expected of me, of us, and what's not? There's also something we share, isn't there; compassion for the afflicted and relief that we're healthy, or if ill then struggling for health, or some sense of it. And if seriously ill, when hope crashes against pain or the dulling effect of opiates, and convalescence becomes endurance—what then? [End Page 71]

One response—poignant, real, irrepressible, exquisite, caustic, and funny by turns—comes from Max Blecher. In English we have only met him recently, with the 2015 translation of his novel Adventures in Immediate Irreality (1936). In The Illuminated Burrow, the work reviewed here, illness is the cause and inspiration. There is nothing that Blecher has written that is not fed by his convalescent experience either. Tuberculosis spondylitis, or Pott disease (causing bone destruction, deformity, and paraplegia), was incurable when he wrote the book. Nonetheless, by it, but not only it, he valorized the "secret life of the body" and the intimate vision he brought to the literature he created and the world he knew. He wrote the book in bed, too, completely immobilized, the bed he died in that same year, 1938.

Blecher was born in 1909 to bourgeois Jewish parents in Botoșani, a town in northeast Romania, and spent his school years in Roman, some fifty miles distant. After graduating, he went to study medicine in Paris. There, in 1928, symptoms appeared, and the diagnosis. He became paraplegic, though he briefly regained mobility, endured long periods in a body cast and frequent medical interventions, and was carted about in different wheelchairs and carriages. Desperate to regain his health, he spent the next decade in sanatoriums in Switzerland, France, and Romania. By 1935, with further treatment useless, his family brought him back to Roman, but this time on the outskirts. He continued writing, and corresponded with leading authors and philosophers: André Breton (who published Blecher in the journal Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution), André Gide, Martin Heidegger, Mihail Sebastian, Ilarie Voronca, and others. From physical pain and psychological trauma, certainly, but equally if not more from his love of literature, an exceptional ability to chart motivations met in a dream, however frail or palpable they were, then experienced in reality was born.

What, then, is The Illuminated Burrow? A novel? Or is it more as it reads—a beautifully written, tender, agonizing, rebellious, passionate, precisely rendered narrative, a kind of realistic, lyrical documentation of his agon? Perhaps it is a bit of both, if weighted toward the latter. The loss of physical integrity inspired Blecher to write with the kind of clarity that that can bring, along with its stressful end: death. He doesn't waste any time in the five chapters that make up this book either. Yet he leaves an imperishable sense of having drawn you in so thoroughly that the book he has made of his [End Page 72] body—this riposte to the illness that ravaged him—and his metaphorical title, illuminated burrow, lives on the page as if it were off it.

Blecher put it this way: "To experience something or to dream it is, in my opinion, one and the same, and daily life is as hallucinatory and uncanny as a dream." The statement is not a slight one. Nor is the implication for the reader: to experience events as Blecher described them inside and outside the sanatorium.

Early on, Blecher tells us of a repeating...