The imagination is nothing more than an extension of matter.

— Roger Caillois

[Blecher] leaves an imperishable sense of having drawn you in so thoroughly that the book he has made of his 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.

— Allan Graubard, American Book Review

There is a distinct Proustian interiority to Blecher’s writing here, as the narrator’s inability to get out of bed or accomplish anything without help forces him to delve into his own mind, his memory, and imagination to seemingly spontaneously unravel searching, haunting narratives that often use the surrealist method of sublimating deep-seated fears and desires into everyday objects. This, for Blecher, is life inside the body’s burrow. [...] The Illuminated Burrow is uncanny, strange, illuminating.

— Stephan Delbos, B O D Y

The beauty of Blecher’s prose and the focus of his observations often pull the reader away from the depth of suffering, as does the variety of events he experiences as he grapples with the unfathomable.

— Rick Henry, Rain Taxi

The novel is a powerful final testament that insists on delving into, with the utmost intensity, the manifold nature of each moment – apparent and invisible, corporeal and fantastical, light and dark, secret and hallucinatory.

— Sanders Isaac Bernstein, The London Magazine

Everything that happens in the outside world is filtered through [Blecher's] uncommon intellect, processed almost beyond recognition, then sent back into the world as exquisite, highly penetrating prose. [...] Gabi Reigh’s translation is so good that it reads as if Blecher wrote the book in English.

— Costica Bradatan, The TLS

There’s something unsettling about reading a work of autobiographical fiction in which the author traces the arc of their own waning health. But Blecher’s work is more complex than that description makes it sound: imagine a Venn diagram charting the overlap between Pessoa and Kafka and you might have a sense of where to start. And some of the prose, in Reigh’s translation, is stunning ...

— Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders