There was a woman at my side, a woman in black, in mourning, her face veiled. Oddly enough, the woman had no head. The veils were tastefully arranged where the head should have been, but she had only a gaping hole there instead, an empty sphere running down to the nape of the neck. We were both in a hurry, following a cart with red crosses on the sides: it was carrying the corpse of the woman’s husband.

I realized there was a war going on, and in fact we soon came to a station. . . . Suddenly a man came out of a first class compartment; he was portly and well dressed, had a decoration in his buttonhole, and was wearing a monocle and white shoes. His bald spot was poorly hidden by several strands of silver hair. In his arms he held a white Pekinese, its eyes like two agate marbles in oil.

For a while he paraded up and down the platform looking for something. Finally he found it: a flower-girl. He chose several bouquets of red carnations from her basket and paid her for them, taking the money out of an elegant wallet of soft leather with a silver monogram. Then he went back to the train and I could see him putting the Pekinese on the table by the window and feeding it the red carnations one by one. The animal ingested them with obvious relish.

Blecher threads his observations into every page of this book just as densely and accurately. The details go clicking by. Tiny filaments of hair, little balls of agate, small tables, miniature dogs, petite bouquets—within the sweet substance of the diminutive, the details head into the monstrous.

M. Blecher—in letters he sometimes wrote Max or Marcel, but as an author he only appeared with the anonymizing initial M.—was a Romanian Jew, born in 1909 in Botoşani in the northeastern part of the country. His family owned a small ceramic factory on the edge of town and a ceramics and porcelain shop in the center. He traveled to Paris to study medicine. When he was nineteen he contracted osteal tuberculosis, and spent the rest of his short life in sanatoria. When his parents ran out of money for his treatment abroad, he had to return to Romania, where he died at the age of twenty-eight.

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.

Romanian literati lived in fear of Eugène Ionesco’s scathing reviews. But when Blecher’s Adventures in Immediate Irreality appeared in a limited edition in 1936, he praised the book. Unfortunately it never achieved commercial success. And then came the years of fascism. And in 1945, after the annihilation of the Jews, came Stalinism. And after that came the home-grown variety of socialism, which entrenched itself behind a fraudulent ideology, never faced up to its own connivance in the barbarity, and even had anti-Semitism built into the system as a matter of course. Until the collapse of the dictatorship, national provincialism made it impossible for a Romanian Jew to be recognized as one of the best Romanian authors. And after 1989 the anti-Semites felt even more empowered, and anti-Semitism, having hatched out of socialism, is now allowed the same blatant free expression, and the same language, as in the fascist era. Once again the so-called intelligentsia is busy picking up the pieces and hammering them into a narrow-minded “national remembrance,” a little plywood box where someone like Blecher doesn’t fit. Most likely they’re afraid of this book, because it addresses a nightmarish truth and couldn’t care less for “national remembrance.”

“The certitudes I lived by were separated from the world of incertitudes by only the flimsiest of membranes,” says Blecher’s protagonist. What makes the author’s view so radical is the eroticism that lurks in every ordinary object, waiting to ensnare a person. The narrator interacts with objects in a way one can really only interact with people.