Stories in direct unreality

Blecher was born in 1909 in Botoşani, northern Moldova, as the son of a wealthy Jewish porcelain merchant. He went to school in Romania and then enrolled in medical school in Paris. However, in 1928 he had to interrupt his studies because he was diagnosed with Pott's disease (spinal tuberculosis). From then on, he was treated in various French, Swiss, and Romanian sanatoriums. From 1935, until his death three years later, as an incurable patient, he lived and wrote again in the city of Roman, permanently bedridden. He made the closed, immobile life bearable with varied intellectual activities, he read, wrote and painted surrealist pictures. Social life was mostly replaced by correspondence: among his correspondence partners were André Breton, André Gide, Martin Heidegger, as well as many prominent representatives of Romanian modern and avant-garde literature: llarie Voronca, Geo Bogza, Saşa Pană, Mihail Sebastian. He wrote his poems collected in a volume entitled Corp transparent, then sketches and prose, on the top hat fastened to his knees. In 2016, his writing "Inimi cicatrize" was made into a film. Blecher's name as a writer is primarily based on his surrealist-inspired prose, especially his novel with autobiographical elements entitled Stories in Direct Irreality, in which Mircea Cărtărescu, for example, believes he discovers the early signs of postmodernism.