Here only extremes combine to form completely new properties. To be sure, the objects retain their familiar names, but their looks and features get reinvented. The newly perceived sweeps away the familiar. And there’s no use opposing it, because in the act of reading, the shrewdness of every observation acquires greater validity than anything you might recall from your own observations of the familiar objects. In the words of Blecher’s protagonist: “I had the vague feeling that nothing in the world can come to fruition.” Nothing is ever completed. And this narrator is concerned with much more than completion.

Blecher’s eroticism of perception requires the constant comparison of one thing with a hitherto unimaginable other. In this eroticized world things venture into the outrageous: “When I got to the marketplace, I found men unloading meat for the butcher shops, their arms laden with sides of red and purple beasts glistening with blood, as tall and proud as dead princesses. . . . They were lined up along the porcelain-white walls like scarlet sculptures carved from the most diverse and delicate material. They had the watery, iridescent shimmer of silk and the murky limpidity of gelatin.” Or: “There were always nuts in a bowl, and Samuel Weber, who was especially fond of them, would swallow them slowly, peacefully, bit by bit, his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down like a puppet on a rubber band.” And Samuel Weber’s son Ozy has “flute-like arms.” Or: “I felt the silence in me smiling calmly, as if someone were blowing soap bubbles there.” While taking a temperature “the slender glass lizard of a thermometer” glides under the arm. And of the doctor who is treating the malaria stricken protagonist, Blecher writes: “His small velvet eyes, fitful gestures, and thrust-forward mouth made him look like a mouse. The impression was so immediate and so strong that I thought it perfectly natural that he should give his r’s a long and sonorous roll as if he were munching something in secret as he spoke. The quinine he gave me only increased my conviction there was something mouse-like about him.” Behind the sewing machine shop was a small room referred to as “the green room”—when no customer is around the ailing protagonist hastily makes love with Clara. On one such occasion he spots a mouse out of the corner of his eye, perched on Clara’s powder compact:

It had paused next to the mirror on the edge of the trunk and was staring at me with its tiny black eyes. The lamplight had given them two gleaming golden spots, which pierced me deeply and peered into my own eyes for several seconds with such intensity that they seemed to penetrate my brain. Perhaps the creature was searching for a curse to call down on me or perhaps for a mere reproach . . . I was certain the doctor had come to spy on me.

This supposition was confirmed that very evening as I took my quinine. . . . I found it perfectly acceptable: the quinine was bitter. The doctor had seen the pleasure Clara could give me in the back room and to get even he had prescribed the nastiest medicine on earth. . . .

A few months after he first treated me, he was found dead in his attic: he had put a bullet through his brain.

The first thing I asked myself when I heard the gruesome news was, ‘Were there mice in the attic?’ I needed to know.