Mar 30, 2014. Welcome to a new edition of /lit/'s sharethreads! I'll be posting some books. Most of them hard to find in digital format or interesting enough to warrant uploading a retail or properly formatted copy. Chances are that anything I'll be posting here will be of better quality than stuff off IRC. I'm taking requests too. Press, 2000). Searchable pdf (clearscan) with contents in bookmarks, accurate pagination and metadata, etc. Ferdydurke - Witold Gombrowicz.pdf(2.97 MB); Ferdydurke - Witold Gombrowicz.jpg(135.3 kB); Ferdydurke - Witold Gombrowicz.opf(5.51 kB); pharmakate.txt(185 B).

The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable - and most chilling - is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports ra The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable - and most chilling - is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one. Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew killed by the Nazis in 1942, is considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between the two world wars. Bruno Schulz's untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.

Illustrated with Schulz's original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and influential writers. ”They maintain that every woman in that district is a tart.

In fact, it is enough to stare at any of them, and at once you meet an insistent clinging look which freezes you with the certainty of fulfillment. Even the schoolgirls wear their hair ribbons in a characteristic way and walk on their slim legs with a peculiar step, an impure expression in their eyes that foreshadows their future corruption.” Schulz sketch There is a sexual madness bubbling in the corners of every scene in this collectio ”They maintain that every woman in that district is a tart.

In fact, it is enough to stare at any of them, and at once you meet an insistent clinging look which freezes you with the certainty of fulfillment. Even the schoolgirls wear their hair ribbons in a characteristic way and walk on their slim legs with a peculiar step, an impure expression in their eyes that foreshadows their future corruption.” Schulz sketch There is a sexual madness bubbling in the corners of every scene in this collection. Desire is wrapped around the words of the text squeezing them tight, producing extended breasts, hips, and flared stocking clad legs. The young lad, who is our narrator, is of age to be beset by those hormones that make every female seem like the personification of Aphrodite. Even the glimpse of an elbow or a soft white neck or a foot can give a young man flutters in his stomach.

”She then moved her chair forward and, without getting up from it, lifted her dress to reveal her foot tightly covered in black silk, and then stretched out stiffly like a serpent’s head.” His father was a merchant and quite insane. Shulz shares with us the slow degradation of his father’s mind as fears overcome reason. ”He lay on the floor naked, stained with black totem spots, the lines of his ribs heavily outlined, the fantastic structure of his anatomy visible through the skin; he lay on his face, in the grip of the obsession of loathing which dragged him into the abyss of its complex paths. He moved with the many-limbed, complicated movements of a strange ritual in which I recognized with horror an imitation of the ceremonial crawl of a cockroach.” If this were a Greek play, cockroaches would be the chorus.

Schulz self-portrait. Schulz’s had a deep command of language. He used archaic words and put sentences together in ways I’ve never experienced before. All the stories are connected but disjointed, and Schulz would often spin this reader off into the snow, leaving me spitting slivers of ice from my mouth. I always ran after the sled and climbed back on to watch with slitted eyes for low hanging tree limbs to duck and to be prepared to pull my snagged coat loose from the dead, brittle bushes overhanging the road. ”We walked alongside the hairy rim of darkness, brushing against the furry bushes, their lower branches snapping under our feet in the bright night, in a false milky brightness. The diffuse whiteness of light filtered by the snow, by the pale air, by the milky space, was like the gray paper of an engraving on which the thick bushes corresponded to the deep black lines of the decoration.” I could share so many more instances of superb, unusual writing that make the head soar with the headiness of the visions he created, but I do have to let you experience most of them in the course of reading the stories for yourself.

Bruno Schulz was a Polish Jew from Drohobycz and, unfortunately, was caught up in the events of WW2. He was moved into a ghetto. He was discovered by an admirer of his writing, a Nazi Gestapo officer named Felix Landau. He was commissioned by Landau, in exchange for protection, to paint a mural on a wall of his residency in Drohobycz. Schulz had it better than most, but fate is a fickle wench, and on November 19th, 1942, he was gunned down while walking home with a loaf of bread by another Gestapo officer, Karl Gunther, who was enraged that Landau had shot and killed one of his personal Jews. What a gift to humanity it would have been if the Nazi officers had just had the decency to shoot each other.

The mural was covered over and wasn’t rediscovered until 2001. A piece of the mural. This collection is just a glimpse of the body of work that we would have enjoyed from this talented writer if his life had not been tragically cut short. He was working on a novel at the time of his murder, but it has never surfaced. There is always hope that someday it will been found. People compare Schulz to Kafka and other writers who push the boundaries of reality, but to me he isn’t like those other writers.

He was a new star with his own unique spectrum who became a supernova before he had a chance to shine across the universe. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit I also have a Facebook blogger page.

8.33 am March 3rd 2016 There are so many thoughts and impressions pushing for a prime position in this review space that for the moment I'm just sitting on them all, frantically trying to hold them down as I think about a shape for them which will be vaguely comprehensible to someone who hasn't read this book/doesn't live inside my head. But the task will certainly involve excluding some of those many impressions and I can sense already that I'll have a rebellion on my hands as rogue thoughts ste 8.33 am March 3rd 2016 There are so many thoughts and impressions pushing for a prime position in this review space that for the moment I'm just sitting on them all, frantically trying to hold them down as I think about a shape for them which will be vaguely comprehensible to someone who hasn't read this book/doesn't live inside my head.

But the task will certainly involve excluding some of those many impressions and I can sense already that I'll have a rebellion on my hands as rogue thoughts steal into the review while I'm asleep. I will have to be very vigilant, perhaps enter into some kind of contract with the review space so that it will refuse entry to thoughts that don't carry a pass signed by me personally. I'll be watching this space........ 12.20pm March 3rd 'We are the tandeta, the reviewer's stray thoughts, and though we have no clothes as yet, we are determined to camp in this review space. Bruno Schulz himself has given us permission and we defy anyone to remove us.' 8.40 am March 4th I had to look up the word 'tandeta' which has just appeared in the review space (see above and comment #4) and I discovered that it is an almost untranslatable Polish word which Schulz uses regularly, a word that means variously: 'trash', 'shoddy', 'cast-off'. It also means the kind of market where such second-rate goods can be found, a flea-market, for example.

Of course that implies that the group of decrepit military wax-figures which the narrator frees from a wax museum in the story called 'Spring', and which you can see in the drawing above, are declaring that my stray thoughts are second-rate. That's a deep blow. I had marshalled a few of those thoughts into a coherent paragraph earlier this morning and was quite pleased with the result. Now I'm not so sure - but I refuse to be intimidated by a bunch of moth-eaten ex-generals so I'll post the paragraph anyway: Schulz is a magician. From the blank interior of his top-hat, he pulls streams and streams of multi-hued words, words that separate and reform into pink doves, blue buzzards, red storks, yellow pelicans, each with long ribbons of syllables dangling from their beaks. And when the ribbons break off, they float away on the breeze, looping and dipping in arabesques across a papery sky, spelling out stories, one stranger than the next, stories for then, stories for now, stories for ever........ 15.00 March 5th Further stray thoughts on the concept of ‘tandeta’: Schulz’s stories give a lot of attention to what the world generally thinks of as only fit for the rubbish heap.

One story centres on an old almanac the narrator loved to look through as a child and which he later comes across when most of its pages have been torn out to serve some domestic purpose, perhaps to light the fire in the stove. He then proceeds to endow the ragged remains of this old catalogue of ancient dates and obsolete advertisements with the properties of every book that ever existed.

It becomes The Book of Books. And so we realise that from ‘tandeta’ or rubbish, the narrator believes something truly beautiful can always be created. This experience is repeated again and again throughout the stories as the things people generally seek to discard become instead things of beauty. A faded curtain stiff with dust, dead flies on a windowpane, moss grown paths, old tree roots, such things are constantly celebrated. Schulz writes Under The Sign of the Rubbish Heap........ 15.55 March 5th Since it seems that anything can happen in this review space, the book itself surely has a right to speak. Yes, this Penguin Classics edition of Bruno Schulz’s collected stories is claiming space to announce that what the reader gets inside the covers of this book is nothing less than magical: thirty stories and novellas plus thirty illustrations by Schulz himself.

The stories are drawn from the two collections published in the author’s lifetime, 'Cinnamon Shops' from 1933 and 'Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass', from 1937 (though written earlier than the stories in Cinnamon Shops) plus a few other stories that had appeared in periodicals and journals around that time. Not all of the stories are illustrated but where they occur, the fantastical nature of the drawings complements the hallucinatory narratives perfectly, introducing a further layer of eccentricity to the work. However, even when there are no illustrations, the words cast surreal images onto the screen of the reader’s mind: Father was listening. In the silence of the night his ear seemed to grow larger and to reach out beyond the window: a fantastic coral, a red polypus watching the chaos of the night. The translation in this edition was done by Celina Wieniewska, and the rich and exciting language of the stories is the proof of the success of her work, which was not an easy task as David A.

Goldfarb points out in the introduction. According to Goldfarb, Bruno Schulz uses a number of words that are so obscure even in Polish that Wieniewska was obliged to be very creative in order to render them in English. This Penguin Classics edition, standing in for the author who would certainly have been exceedingly grateful to her, bows before Wieniewska’s talent and would kiss her feet........ 20.50 March 5th The peacock-feather eye peeping through the keyhole, the pattern on wallpaper shifting to echo the father’s frowns, the squares of a parquet floor endlessly counting themselves in horizontal creaks and vertical cracks, chimney smoke weaving to avoid the wind, lamps with arms akimbo, mirrors that appear elderly, everything in a Schulz story, even the shadow on the wall, is personified so that the reader should not be at all surprised when the book the stories inhabit itself speaks aloud as it has done above. Have you ever noticed swallows rising in flocks from between the lines of certain books?

One should read the flight of these birds........ 2.00 am March 6th How many possibilities we provide, we, the humble review boxes of this bookreview world. We offer a luminous space where a winking curser waits patiently to receive the reviewer's words, words which may be written in a thousand different ways depending on the reviewer in question, sometimes baldly, sometimes boldly, sometimes in hints and ellipses, dashes and dots. The gaps that result have to be surmised by the vague guesses and suppositions of review readers and we always offer our sympathy for the predicament they find themselves in, especially if they feel called upon to comment after reading. At other times we are packed tight with dense blocks of severe text, and not a paragraph break occurs to offer a breathing space. Our sighs are then as audible as the readers’ who attempt to decipher us, bless their dedicated souls. Please release us, we entreat, and when occasionally a careful reader selects a phrase, a sentence, or on a good day, an entire paragraph, to copy into a comment box, how we cheer and applaud at the break it brings to the tedium.

When we're very bored indeed we call in Autocorrect and let her loose. That can be fun - especially if the referees are posturing from a ballsy scream and can't feck back easily to see how the next has appalled.

We sit patiently like spiders in a web, waiting for an unsuspecting reader to come along, and then we roll about laughing as they scroll back and forth scanning our words in a state of the greatest perplexity. Our favourite reviewers are those who use html to vary our presentation by means of spoilers, links and images. Imagine our excitement as we lie in wait to spot which links refuse to work and which images fail in the days that follow. Truth is, it's very easy to interfere with html code; if we breathe out in a vigorous way, a vital element can fly off like a button from an overcoat. That can be a fun exercise. Needless to add, our favourite readers are those who pause to press the ‘like’ button with a good firm touch (no light, tickly ones, please). Then, the utter thrill - there is nothing to compare with it.......

12.12 March 6th 'The End of the Review' Speaking in our capacity as members of the final section of this review, we have voted to set it in place here and now, and to block any further delays and prevarications in the finalisation of this review. Three days is more than enough time for a review to be ‘ongoing’; there is a limit to everything. And while we are aware that certain topics have not been covered or only very sketchily, we don’t support the idea that any review should ever seek to be totally comprehensive. The shorter the better is our motto, especially as such a policy allows 'The End of the Review' to be reached more speedily. As to the length of 'The End of the Review', we are more flexible on that point since everyone agrees that 'the ending' is the most important part of any piece of writing. We deem it relevant to note here also that this particular review is more playful than we might like, a fact we tolerate in this case because it underlines that Bruno Schulz tells most of his stories from the point of view of a child with a very vivid imagination and a very extravagant taste in metaphor, at least in our opinion.

As in this review, Schulz’s stories are filled with distortions of time and space, both being given life and agency over their surroundings, something we are also less than comfortable with, let it be noted. The result of such manipulation is a certain warped effect, as if viewing an event through the glass of a very old window where sometimes the view is completley clear and at other times completely fuzzy, not ideal in our considered opinion. Furthermore, as in the sections of this review which, in spite of their differences in style and tone, are nevertheless part of a whole, Schulz’s stories share characters and locations so that instead of reading as individual pieces, they rather build into one long novel, a fact which may offer satisfaction to the reader who prefers novels to short stories.

Knowing that Schulz was born quite a few years after his brother and sister, and when his father had begun to grow old encourages us to postulate that these stories contain many autobiographical elements since they mostly feature an elderly father and his young son. The mother and a servant called Adela also roam from story to story and provide some entertainment, Adela in particular, who, with her broom constantly to hand, sweeps away entire heaps of ‘tandeta’ whenever she gets the chance, something we would have enjoyed doing in this review had we but a broom.

We quite liked Adela. Bruno Schulz, loner from Drogobych as he was named, in this collection of short stories, impressions actually, evokes that distant land called childhood. At the centre of that created world is, quite patriarchal, figure of the father - unstuck from reality, absorbed in thoughts and deep in his eccentricities. Birds, mannequins and cockroaches gradually are occupying his mind. One by one, he shook off the bonds off association with human society.

In the background are the other people around the Bruno Schulz, loner from Drogobych as he was named, in this collection of short stories, impressions actually, evokes that distant land called childhood. At the centre of that created world is, quite patriarchal, figure of the father - unstuck from reality, absorbed in thoughts and deep in his eccentricities. Birds, mannequins and cockroaches gradually are occupying his mind.

One by one, he shook off the bonds off association with human society. In the background are the other people around the author: mother, dreamy and neglecting the house; a domestic help Adela, like a pagan goddess, rampant and emanating femininity; aunts and uncles and cousins. And the house itself, like a labyrinth with unknown number of rooms, where household, especially father is disappearing for whole weeks to emerge unexpectedly another day, cobwebbed and dusted. At the forefront, however, is an unique and extremely dense language. The atmosphere is dreamy-like, the novel reads in just sensual way, you can feel it with your sight, taste and scent. Adela returned on luminous mornings, like Pomona from the fire of the enkindled day, tipping from her basket the colorful beauty of the sun: glistening wild cherries, full of water under their transparent skins, mysterious black cherries whose aroma surpassed that which would be realized in their taste, and apricots,in whose golden pulp lay the core of the long afternoons. Schulz captures our senses from the very first passage.

Seemingly ordinary house under his pen populates with mythical creatures, animated things and humanized animals; wallpapers and candelabrums seem to live own life; mythologized reality, a rich, almost baroque vocabulary and unbridled imagination of the author, metaphors and ornamentation of the language are used here to describe the world which is going to pass. But before that happens, before the winds of history wipe away a small Galician town, its houses and shops,merchants and teachers, before they destroy the author, let him seduce us and invite to his world. Let’s immerse ourselves in lazy summer day of August when heat appears to dizzying us and, wandering around in the backstreets, set off to look for cinamonn shops. Preface This volume contains two collections of short stories and three additional stories that were originally published with Schulz's letters, drawings and miscellaneous prose. I'll review each of the collections separately under their GR titles. After only two or three stories, I started having really vivid responses, which I turned into a story.

I normally place any creative responses to a book at the end of my more analytical review. However, this time, I'll reverse the order, so that the revi Preface This volume contains two collections of short stories and three additional stories that were originally published with Schulz's letters, drawings and miscellaneous prose. I'll review each of the collections separately under their GR titles. After only two or three stories, I started having really vivid responses, which I turned into a story. I normally place any creative responses to a book at the end of my more analytical review. However, this time, I'll reverse the order, so that the review doesn't pre-empt what I was trying to achieve with the story.

The Mannequin in the House [Inspired by the Life and Works of Bruno Schulz] My grandfather and I were the first to awake that morning. When I came down from my room, he was already in the study, reading the arts pages of the weekend newspaper.

My family were tailors, but my grandfather loved to read. He usually read the news and politics on Saturday, and the arts pages on Sunday, when he had more time. I hadn't meant to wake up that early. I quickly became restless. Bmw E60 Drivers Airbag Fault.

It wasn't light yet, and my grandfather had only turned on a reading light next to his chair. He was always conscious of conserving energy and money. His thrift had served him and our family well, I suppose.

Grandfather saw that I was fidgety, and went into the kitchen. He gave me some coins from the old money tin, and suggested I go to the bakery and buy some pastries for breakfast.

When I closed the front door behind me, it was already starting to get light. I remember the streetlights turning off as I rounded the corner. Then I noticed a lot of vehicles and men in uniform. I tried not to look at them.

I don't know how closely they looked at me, but they didn't try to stop me. By the time I returned to the corner with our pastries, they had blocked the street.

There were fire engines at the corner, but they weren't letting them in. The firemen were pointing down the street, agitated, but the men in uniform were holding them back. When I got close enough to look down our street, I could see that four houses on our side of the street were on fire. They were all in the same block, and one of them belonged to our family. I strained to hear anything above the roar of the fire.

I thought I heard screams, but nobody emerged from any of the buildings. A few times, I thought I heard gunshots. I didn't know what to do. Nobody who passed me in the street looked me in the eye. It was as if I wasn't there, as if I too must have died in the fire. I decided to walk to my uncle's home. It was a kilometre away.

When I arrived there, he was already in his car with my aunt and my two cousins. 'What's happening?' 'They're coming for us. We have to leave immediately, or they will kill us, too.' They had a few possessions in the car with them, but not many.

We had to go near our home to get out of the city. I asked if I could have a look at it one last time. My aunt and uncle discussed the risks on the way there. As we got near the corner, I realised that the men in uniform were nowhere to be seen.

The street was empty, apart from the fire engines. I was allowed to walk down to the remains of our home with my oldest cousin, Rudy. The houses had been three storeys high, and each of them had fallen inwards. Even before I thought about everything my family had lost, including their lives, I can still remember that my first reaction was how little is left of a home when it is destroyed by fire. The pile of rubble didn't even come up to my head. Rudy started to tug at my hand, and I realised that we had to go, before it was too late. I took one last look, and it was then that I saw one of grandfather's mannequins.

Somehow it didn't seem to have been damaged at all. I looked at it, and it looked at me, and we said our goodbyes, for the time being. I think they had intended to clear the whole neighbourhood, and rebuild new residences there, but when I returned eighteen months later after the war had ended, nothing had changed.

Even the mannequin was poking out of the top of the rubble, looking at me. I went up to it, lifted it upright, and brushed off the ash and dust. It now stood proud above the rubble. I assume this was the moment it resumed its work for my family. The men in uniform had never made their way to my aunt and uncle's home, and I returned there with them. Each day, they let me visit our home. I think they assumed that I would one day put it behind me.

They were as surprised as I was when I told them what had happened the following days. Each day I returned, a storey of our home seem to be re-constructed, by itself, where previously there had only been rubble. By the third day, it seemed to be complete, so for the first time, I entered our home, and discovered that it was exactly as I had left it. It was as if this pile of rubble, this empty space, had memorised our home, and given the opportunity, it had rebuilt it from memory. But that is only the first part of my story.

I moved back into my room. Rudy was allowed to join me as company. But I always had a feeling that the house was watching us. Now that it existed, it was trying to reconstruct its life, too. One Saturday morning, I came downstairs, went to the bakery, and when I returned, I noticed somebody sitting in the study with a newspaper. It was my grandfather.

He asked whether I had got him his usual rugelach. I'm sure that I had only ordered enough pastries for Rudy and me, but when I looked into the paper bag, I realised I had enough food for the entire family. I assembled it all on a plate on the dining table.

Then, as I waited, one by one, my whole family descended from above and said hello, as if nothing had happened. I was only fourteen, but I noticed that everybody looked to me for guidance. I didn't know why or what for. Soon I seem to have re-established all of our family routines, because it was expected of me.

One that mattered to all of us was evening supper. No matter who had been home for dinner, we all gathered for an hour or so before going to bed. It was when we listened to everybody's stories about what they had done that day or in the past. The first evening, my grandfather asked, 'Can you remember one of my stories?' Well, of course I could, I had sat in his lap for years, memorising his stories as if, one day, when I had grandchildren, they might seem like my stories. One by one, over the next few weeks, I told everybody's stories. Initially, they just nodded in agreement.

Occasionally, somebody else said, 'That's a good one.' Then one day, at supper, nobody looked at me with their usual expectation. Instead, grandfather started by telling a story, then my father said, 'Funny, that reminds me,' and he told one of his stories.

After a while, as I had become accustomed to, I said, 'OK, it's time we all went off to bed.' Everybody looked at me with bemusement.

I was, after all, the youngest in the room. Then they laughed. I looked over to the corner of the dining room, and noticed that even the mannequin was laughing. To this day, we don't go to bed, until each of us has told one of our stories. Darkness and Light I first became aware of Bruno Schulz, when I read one of my favourite novels, Nicole Krauss' 'The History of Love', which I highly recommend.

By the time I got around to reading Schulz's book, I was aware that its original Polish title had been 'Cinnamon Shops'. I didn't know much else about the subject matter of the book. For me, both alternative titles summon up exotic images of Jewish life between the wars. I expected the stories to flesh out these images. I had no idea how thoroughly and profoundly they would do so, but not in the manner I had anticipated. There is a lot of darkness and light in the collection. The darkness describes the interior of the narrator's second-floor apartment.

The light describes the sun-lit world outside, often described as luminous, that offers up its fruit, vegetables, meat and seafood for consumption. People and music move between these worlds. The apartment can become light, just by pulling the curtains. Although the darkness and light is grounded in reality, there is a sense in which it is metaphorical, even metaphysical, and in this way it seems to be prescient of the horror of the Holocaust. Cinnamon Shops I had assumed that the cinnamon shops would describe the outlets of 'truly noble' merchants from which the characters would purchase their groceries (and books). They do, but the reason for this title is not so much the exotic spices that are on sale, or their smell, but the colour of the timber panelling on the walls.

Many of my favourite European-style restaurants and cafes share this cinnamon appearance. It will now have far greater significance for me. These buildings are not brand new. They are old, they carry history on their shoulders and in their bones. This is Aunt Agatha's home, for example: 'In the gloom of the hall, with its old lithographs, rotten with mildew and blind with age, we rediscovered a well-known smell.

In that old familiar smell was contained a marvellously simple synthesis of the life of those people, the distillation of their race, the quality of their blood, and the secret of their fate, imperceptibly mixed day by day with the passage of their own, private time.' The buildings don't just reflect and preserve Jewish culture and tradition, they keep it alive, apparently both metaphorically and literally.

Still, like all matter, they form part of a process of gradual decline and decay. The paragraph continues: 'The old, wise door, the silent witness of the entries and exits of mother, daughters, sons, whose dark sighs accompanied the comings and goings of those people, now opened noiselessly like the door of a wardrobe, and we stepped into their life.' I was starting to get the impression that the narrator's world observes and memorises us, that it has human traits. So Very Remote Like the building, the narrator's eccentric father, Jacob, is 'slowly fading, wilting before our eyes.' His personality is disintegrating into 'a number of opposing and quarrelling selves [which] dissolved into curses, execrations, maledictions, and insults [after which came] a period of appeasement, of an interior calm, a blessed serenity of spirit.' Jacob resides on the borderline between immobility and animation.

He surrounds himself with old junk and oddities. He lives deep inside his own imagination, 'almost completely rid of bodily needs.'

: 'We did not count him as one of us anymore, so very remote had he become from everything that was human and real. Knot by knot, he loosened himself from us; point by point, he gave up the ties joining him to the human community.[All that remained of him was] the small shroud of his body and the handful of nonsensical oddities.'

Jacob is almost metamorphosing into the other world of buildings. The Metaphysical Conjurer The building is almost human, while Jacob has almost become part of the furniture. The concept of this metamorphosis might sound Kafkaesque, but its design and application is unique to Schulz. Still, within the enchantment of his imagination, Jacob has a kingdom and a throne, that together constitute a sovereign magic, although this too is bound to be taken away from him. Jacob is a 'metaphysical conjurer', opposed to the ordinary, the uniform, the unimaginative, the dull, the conformist, the compliant, the complicit: 'Only now do I understand the lonely hero who alone had waged war against the fathomless, elemental boredom that strangled the city. Without any support, without recognition on our part, that strangest of men was defending the lost cause of poetry.

He was like a magic mill.' The life of the imagination battles against both the uniform and uniforms.

The Humus of Memories Jacob marvels at how beautiful and simple life is: 'The newly awakened joy of life transformed every sensation into a great joke, into gaiety.an attempt to express the incredible wonder of that capital enterprise, life, so full of unexpected encounters, pleasures, and thrills.' In 'Tailors' Dummies', paradoxically, humans have become like automatons, while the mannequins have acquired a pseudo-life, their source of sustenance 'old apartments saturated with the emanations of numerous existences and events; used-up atmospheres, rich in the humus of memories, of nostalgia, and of sterile boredom.' At a time in history when we would hope that mankind would be most vital, it is actually in retreat.

Apocrypha and Palimpsests In the absence of any other guide, Jacob is mapping the psyche of the Street of Crocodiles, this other world 'of which almost nothing is known'. It proves to be as complicated and mortal as any human being: '[Apartments like this are] unstable, degenerate, and receptive to abnormal temptations: it is then that on this sick, tired, and wasted soil colourful and exuberant mildew can flourish in a fantastic growth, like a beautiful rash.' Still, for all this transgression, the outside world impinges on the Street of Crocodiles: 'The women of the Street of Crocodiles are depraved to only a modest extent, stifled by thick layers of moral prejudice and ordinary banality. In that city of cheap human material, no instincts can flourish, no dark and unusual passions can be aroused.' In Freudian terms, the outside world is still a place where the Id is oppressed by the Super-Ego. The Street of Crocodiles is some sort of reprieve, even if it must be a product of the imagination: 'The Street of Crocodiles was a concession of our city to modernity and metropolitan corruption. Obviously, we were unable to afford anything better than a paper imitation, a montage of illustrations cut out from last year's moldering newspapers.'

The Indispensable Minimum Jacob has but one complaint about creation. He calls for 'Less matter, more form!' He speculates that there might be too much matter and complexity. This excess is wasted.

It has ceased to be beautiful. It has become ugly. He decides to experiment on his brother. He commits to 'a gradual shedding of all his characteristics in order to lay bare his deepest self.[He] reduced Uncle to the indispensable minimum, by removing from him one by one all of the inessentials. 'Uncle functioned excellently.

There was no instance of his refusal to obey. Having discarded his complicated personality, in which at one time he had lost himself, he found at last the purity of a uniform and straightforward guiding principle to which he was subjected from now on. 'At the cost of his complexity, which he could manage only with difficulty, he had now achieved a simple problem-free immortality.' The Ultrabarrel of Myth Was Uncle happy?

Not really: 'A question like this makes sense only when applied to creatures who are rich in alternative possibilities.Uncle Edward had no alternatives; the dichotomy 'happy/unhappy' did not exist for him because he had become completely integrated.' Ultimately, Jacob realises that he has been working against an eternal, cosmic order: 'He understood that he had gone too far, and put a rein on the flight of his fancies.The enormous pathos of all these scenes proved that we had removed the bottom of the eternal barrel of memories, of an ultrabarrel of myth, and had broken into a prehuman night of untamed elements, of incoherent anamnesis, and could not hold the swelling flood.' Perhaps both chaos and complexity are vital aspects of life. Jacob's Cosmology Jacob's theories take us through a cosmological journey, from the atom to the universe. Mankind fits somewhere in between. The wonder of this collection of stories is that it paints a picture of people in real life, while simultaneously speculating on their position in the cosmos.

At the same time, it seems to anticipate the conflict between the Jewish people and Nazism that would lead to the Holocaust. There is a sense in which Jewish culture already seemed to be under threat by the conformism and intolerance of Western culture. Jacob uses his imagination to combat this threat. This was a difficult enough task. However, nobody could have anticipated how difficult the task of combatting Nazism would be. Bruno Schulz didn't survive the combat.

He died for the most banal of reasons. They're detailed in the Introduction. We're incredibly fortunate that these stories survived and that they contribute to our understanding of the Holocaust and mankind. In a way, the survival of these stories helps us to deal with the Holocaust. However, the Introduction informs us that, just as Bruno Schulz died in the Holocaust, so too did his novel called 'The Messiah'. The tragedy is that a book can only work its magic, if it survives the calamity of its era. Whatever the tragedy of losing both the author and his novel, it makes us doubly fortunate that we still have 'The Street of Crocodiles'.

My father survived World War II hiding in a bunker under the town of Drohobych, so I feel eerily connected to this man and his work. It would be fair to call Bruno Schulz Poland's greatest twentieth century writer. This collection of stories changes the very definition of what a short story should be. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end, yes, but the writing is best described as delirious, hypnotic, dreamlike.

You don't read Schulz for the plot; you read for the prose, the intensely sensu My father survived World War II hiding in a bunker under the town of Drohobych, so I feel eerily connected to this man and his work. It would be fair to call Bruno Schulz Poland's greatest twentieth century writer.

This collection of stories changes the very definition of what a short story should be. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end, yes, but the writing is best described as delirious, hypnotic, dreamlike. You don't read Schulz for the plot; you read for the prose, the intensely sensual visuals, the way the words unfurl like the leaves of a magical vine. Inanimate objects struggle to come to life.

Secret rooms grow strange, trapped gardens. A boy blows away with a gust of wind. His father conjures a flock of exotic birds from the pages of a picture book. The details of his life are the stuff of legend.

Bruno Schulz was a shy, frail, brilliant artist, Jewish and secular, who lived in the far eastern Polish town of Drohobych. When his father died, he took on the job of art teacher at the local high school to support his mother, sister and nephew, though he found the work both exhausting and consuming. Drohobych was a particularly brutal place to be in the cauldron of World War II. Thousands of people were marched into the nearby forests and killed, or transported to Treblinka to be gassed. For a year, Schulz found a protector and patron in the person of Felix Landau, an art-loving Nazi whose war diary is well known.

Tragically, he was shot to death around noon on November 19, 1942, at the intersection of Czaki and Mickiewicz Streets, on the eve of his planned escape. These lushly worded stories give no warning of the conflagration that is to follow, but the reader's knowledge of Schulz's fate inescapably informs every line. Read The Street of Crocodiles if you're interested in what was lost in the fires of the Holocaust.

Read it if you want to be consumed by fiction that burns like poetry. But by all means, read this book. Listen: 'And while the children's games became increasingly noisier and more complicated, while the city's flushes darkened into purple, the whole world suddenly began to wilt and blacken and exude an uncertain dusk which contaminated everything. Treacherous and poisonous, the plague of dusk spread, passed from one object to another, and everything it touched became black and rotten and scattered into dust. People fled before it in silent panic, but the disease always caught up with them and spre Listen: 'And while the children's games became increasingly noisier and more complicated, while the city's flushes darkened into purple, the whole world suddenly began to wilt and blacken and exude an uncertain dusk which contaminated everything. Treacherous and poisonous, the plague of dusk spread, passed from one object to another, and everything it touched became black and rotten and scattered into dust. People fled before it in silent panic, but the disease always caught up with them and spread in a dark rash on their foreheads.

Their faces disappeared under large, shapeless spots. They continued on their way, now featureless, without eyes, shedding as they walked one mask after another, so that the dusk became filled with the discarded larvae dropped in their flight.' --from 'The Night of the Great Season' That's Bruno Schulz's description of nightfall. Normally I'm not one who looks for fancy prose in my fiction, though I am of course capable of appreciating it. I'm more interested in story.

And in weird fiction, I'm interested in that otherworldly frisson I experience when reality and unreality come together for brief moments. With Schulz, his prose is just as much a catalyst into his fantastical worlds as the 'story.' In his tales, it's not night outside the window, but 'black night, saturated with dreams and complications.'

A shop's interior can slowly transform into a mountainous landscape. Inanimate objects are given human-like emotions. They can be morose, contemplative, and can even whisper to each other. But not like in children's fairy tales, but more like the real world seen through the eyes of a child.

The real world, only more so. More 'alive.' Colors are described not in shades, but 'octaves,' which is fitting considering Schulz's writing has a sort of poetic quality to it. It can be hard to read at times if you're not in the proper mood, however. When I try to read these stories during the day, I can spend several minutes on each page, desperate to not miss a single clever turn of phrase. At night, it can put me to sleep if I'm not careful.

But real late at night, when I'm past the point of tired and back to wide awake, only punch-drunk, then I can become fully enveloped in this world. It may still take me several minutes per page, but now it's because I have to periodically sit back in wonder and amazement at the pure genius of certain passages.

Reality and fantasy (or unleashed imagination) are in constant flux here, continuously getting in each other's way. But it's not all whimsical. Some stories, such as the novelette-length 'Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,' have an eerie, almost Ligottian or Kafka-esque atmosphere to them.

Most of the stories deal in some way with Schulz's (or the narrator's) father. He can die in one story, then be fine in the next, only smaller. It all may seem rather nonsensical, but once you get into a groove with these tales, it all has a perfect dream logic, in a way.

This book (or rather two books*) never gets old with me. I can re-read these stories countless times and they never lose their magic. Too bad Bruno Schulz's life was cut short at such a young age, as these tales may have been just a mere prelude of even greater things to come. But it's hard to imagine.

5 Stars *This Penguin classics edition contains both his first collection, The Street of Crocodiles, and his followup, Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, the latter of which has many of Schulz's illustrations interspersed throughout, such as the one up top. There Is No Dead Matter No one knows how to distinguish living from non-living matter. At the boundary between them the A-level “7 Characteristics of Life” break down. Viruses, some organic chemical compounds, prions, perhaps some bacteria, among other things don’t fit neatly into the biological vs. Merely material categorisation. We are accustomed to thinking in Darwinian terms: Mind, we presume, emerges in an evolutionary process from matter.

But the 19th century American philosopher C. Peir There Is No Dead Matter No one knows how to distinguish living from non-living matter. At the boundary between them the A-level “7 Characteristics of Life” break down. Viruses, some organic chemical compounds, prions, perhaps some bacteria, among other things don’t fit neatly into the biological vs. Merely material categorisation. We are accustomed to thinking in Darwinian terms: Mind, we presume, emerges in an evolutionary process from matter. But the 19th century American philosopher C.

Peirce audaciously suggested that we have it the wrong way round. For Peirce, matter is a degraded, and therefore a potentially upgradable, form of mind or spirit. Spirit and matter transform mutually into each other; they are alternative forms of that which is. The 17th century Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, would have felt comfortable with Peirce in his intimations of a world imbued with the divine.

Bruno Schulz likely never heard of Peirce, but he would have known about Spinoza in his Galician Jewish community; and he certainly subscribed to Peirce’s philosophy. “There is no dead matterlifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life,” one of Schultz's characters announces. It is not just life which is deserving of respect in The Street of Crocodiles but literally everything that exists, all matter sentient or inert. Both these forms are temporary; each is necessary for the other, and for the emergence of new forms which are at any moment inconceivable.

Such unexpected forms are nonetheless inherent in the infinite possibilities in matter. This attitude has profound consequences. Nothing, for example, is undeserving of one’s attention. Importance does not lie in magnitude or mass but in delicate, not necessarily conventionally beautiful, form. The creeping dementia of one’s parent, for example, is such a form, as it literally transforms its victim from an urban shopkeeper into, temporarily at least, an Old Testament prophet: “He was like a magic mill, into the hoppers of which the bran of empty hours was poured, to re-emerge flowering in all the colours and scents of Oriental spices.” This is remarkably similar to the ethos espoused by Peirce: “What is man?

What a strange union of matter and mind! A machine for converting material into spiritual force.' So too, for Schulz, a retarded village orphan, a puppy, a familiar building, a ghoulish tramp, or a deadly boring winter’s day can be appreciated for the potential they hold. He therefore contends that “we should weepat our own fate, when we see that misery of violated matter, against which a terrible wrong has been committed.” Of course this unconventionality can and does lead to The Great Heresy of man as Creator. It is proclaimed by Schulz’s father in his state of advanced insight/dementia: “If, forgetting the respect due to the Creator, I were to attempt a criticism of creation, I would say ‘Less matter, more form!’' And it is through an imagination worthy of Mervyn Peake that Schulz lays in the forms missed by the divine Creator. Whereas God, as the gnostic Demiurge “was in love with consummate, superb, and complicated materials; we shall give priority to trash. We are simply entranced and enchanted by the cheapness, shabbiness, and inferiority of material.” The demented father, therefore, re-creates creation out of the Demiurge’s dross.

He makes new forms of life beyond that which even God had contemplated, “these primitive forms were unremarkable compared with the richness of shapes and the splendour of the pseudofauna and pseudoflora, which sometimes appeared in certain strictly defined environments, such as old apartments saturated with the emanations of numerous existences and events; used-up atmospheres, rich in the specific ingredients of human dreams; rubbish heaps abounding in the humus of memories, of nostalgia, and of sterile boredom. On such soil, this pseudovegetation sprouted abundantly yet ephemerally, brought forth short-lived generations which flourished suddenly and splendidly, only to wilt and perish.” The pathos is increased infinitely when one knows his fate as a Jew in Galicia - shot as less than vermin by an eminently disrespectful SS officer. In my experience Schulz’s prose and imagination are unique. Among other things, he doesn’t narrate a story, yet still manages to convey a way of being so intimately and concisely that one feels a profoundly important tale has been told.

But unlike a Proust who dwells almost interminably on each and every detail so that one can feel deadened by description, Schulz moves his attention continuously to yet another interesting thing so that his exquisitely laconic descriptions have wonderful force. Schulz's language is somehow comforting while simultaneously unusual and exotic. The effect is not unlike that of Borges in the osmotic passage from the real of the quotidian to the hyper-real of imagination. In the manner of another contemporary, the English Charles Williams, his forms appear sometimes as if a wind from the mouth of God that threatens to consume the world; sometimes as the indistinct but overpowering sound of a mob or crowd of shoppers; sometimes as apocalyptic signs in the air and water; once as the visage of crumbly old Aunt Wanda conjured up on the back of a dining room chair.

I have a conceit that if C. Peirce or Spinoza could have written poetic prose it would look like this. In the spirit of my rambling memoir/ book reviews I will begin with a childhood anecdote that somehow connects or correlates or resonates or slaps a high five with this book. I was raised by a sugar-free bran loving mother.

No soda ('You're better off drinking pool water Nora! Here, Christ, take a straw; go out and drink pool water if you're so intent on poisoning yourself.' ) No white bread (again, a reference to cholorine or bleach- some sort of chemical that would rot and/ or sicken my small i In the spirit of my rambling memoir/ book reviews I will begin with a childhood anecdote that somehow connects or correlates or resonates or slaps a high five with this book. I was raised by a sugar-free bran loving mother. No soda ('You're better off drinking pool water Nora!

Here, Christ, take a straw; go out and drink pool water if you're so intent on poisoning yourself.' ) No white bread (again, a reference to cholorine or bleach- some sort of chemical that would rot and/ or sicken my small insides). Because of this oat bran regime I became a sugar fiend at age three (carob didn't cut it, nor did occasional nutella oatbran toasts). I used every last nickel and dime - I begged borrowed or pilfered- I recycled and cleaned couches- all in the name of candy. Glorious candy. Over time I developed a ritualistic habit of eating particular types of candy.

For the most part the ceremony involved Skittles and M&M's though Mike and Ikes and Starburst worked well enough. While my younger brother drank his treats down, I sat patiently, criss cross on the floor, and slid each candy coated jewel from it's pouch onto the ground before me.

And then I began. With great calm and focus I silently arranged the sugary pearls- I organized, designed, and created small scale works of mathematical genius. Gingery, I slid and placed and replaced the spheres. Following my vision I arranged the mandalas, carefully eating just one orb at a time, re-arranging to compensate as sugar rounds were sacrificed to satisfy my cravings.

This ritual lasted well over an hour. Much to the dismay of my still not sated, impatient brother. Somehow, reading this book triggered that memory, and the only explanation I can come up with is that Schulz' stories, each one, is as wonderful to me now as a bag of Skittles was twenty some years ago. I desperately wanted each chapter to last- I read whole paragraphs and pages over and over again, wanting the imagery evoked to remain firmly planted in my mind. I wanted to weigh it down with some sort of ballast as lately little stays for all that long up there without a modicum of obsession and a striking amount of effort. I was like a skipping record player with some sentences, there were momentary mantras and autistic mumblings.

Each story, though they are all linked, was like the most masterful sugar structure, the most precariously balanced, breath taking M&M monument. Shulz' father, Jacob, is hands down the most fascinating character I have encountered on the page in some time. His relationships with birds, with cockroaches, with women, with fabric, are amazing.

Jacob is my ideal client. I only want to work in a clinic filled with Jacob Schulzes and deformed birds. There will of course be plenty of shelving for all to climb and perch upon. Schulz writes like no one I have read before. His imagination seems so pure, so untainted or constricted. I don't know what else to say.

To the bookstore my bella faccias! Bruno Schulz had an imagination like no one else. His metaphors, similes, and personifications whirl the reader through a cosmos as vivid and surreal as Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” His characters prophesy like the enigmatic beings that inhabit the pages of William Blake. At once fiction and nonfiction, prose and poetry, memory and dream, The Street of Crocodiles defies categorization. Schulz is sometimes compared to Kafka, but he should not be. He is not Kafkaesque.

The world of Kafka is a nightm Bruno Schulz had an imagination like no one else. His metaphors, similes, and personifications whirl the reader through a cosmos as vivid and surreal as Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” His characters prophesy like the enigmatic beings that inhabit the pages of William Blake. At once fiction and nonfiction, prose and poetry, memory and dream, The Street of Crocodiles defies categorization. Schulz is sometimes compared to Kafka, but he should not be. He is not Kafkaesque. The world of Kafka is a nightmare world ~ a nightmare from which one cannot awaken. The world of Schulz is the real world touched by the fantastic, the real world as perceived in a dream.

Nor is this magical realism, for elements of fantasy do not truly invade the real world. It is only the narrator’s perceptions which import the fantastic or the grotesque into the real. The distortions of reality—of time and space—are distortions imposed by the mind of the observer. And the observer is the mythopoeic visionary Bruno Schulz, a man whose dream world is superimposed upon the real one, a man who is at home with the visions of prophets and madmen, a man who never quite lost the childhood ability to see behind the curtain of the mundane, to glimpse the cosmic wonders through which the mass of men and women sleepwalk.

Schulz is like one who awakens in a dream. The following passages highlight three dream elements in The Street of Crocodiles. First, there is spatial distortion. “ I stepped into a winter night bright from the illuminations of the sky. It was one of those clear nights when the starry firmament is so wide and spreads so far that it seems to be divided and broken up into a mass of separate skies, sufficient for a whole month of winter nights and providing silver and painted globes to cover all the nightly phenomena, adventures, occurrences and carnivals.

It is exceedingly thoughtless to send a young boy out on an urgent and important errand into a night like that because in its semiobscurity the streets multiply, becoming confused and interchanged. There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are doubles, make-believe streets. One’s imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which the streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night.” (87-88). Second, there is temporal distortion. “ Everyone knows that in a run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which—like a sixth, smallest toe—grow a thirteenth freak month. We use the word ‘freak’ deliberately, because the thirteenth month only rarely reaches maturity, and like a child conceived late in its mother’s life, it lags behind in growth; it is a hunchback month, a half-witted shoot, more tentative than real.

What is at fault is the senile intemperance of the summer, its lustful and belated spurt of vitality. It sometimes happens that August has passed, and yet the old thick trunk of summer continues by force of habit to produce and from its moldered wood grows those crab-days, weed-days, sterile and stupid, added as an afterthought; stunted, empty, useless days –white days, permanently astonished and quite unnecessary. They sprout, irregular and uneven, formless and joined like the fingers of a monster's hand, stumps folded into a fist. There are people who liken these days to an apocrypha, put secretly between the chapters of the great book of the year; to palimpsests, covertly included between its pages; to those white, unprinted sheets on which eyes, replete with reading and the remembered shapes of words, can imagine colors and pictures, which gradually become paler and paler from the blankness of the pages, or can rest on their neutrality before continuing the quest for new adventures in new chapters” (125-126).

And last, there is the uncanny ~ the revelation of an occult world that coexists with the real world, a world hidden from all but the few whose peculiar nature allows them to discover it. At that late hour the strange and most attractive shops were sometimes open, the shops which on ordinary days one tended to overlook. I used to call them cinnamon shops because of the dark paneling of their walls.

These truly noble shops, open late at night, have always been the objects of my ardent interest. Dimly lit, their dark and solemn interiors were redolent of the smell of paint, varnish and incense; of the aroma of distant countries and rare commodities.

You could find in them Bengal lights, magic boxes, the stamps of long-forgotten countries, Chinese decals, indigo, calaphony from Malabar, the eggs of exotic insects, parrots, toucans, live salamanders and basilisks, mandrake roots, mechanical toys from Nuremberg, homunculi in jars, microscopes, binoculars and most especially strange and rare books, old folio volumes full of astonishing engravings and amazing stories. I remember those old dignified merchants who served their customers with downcast eyes, in discreet silence, and who were full of wisdom and tolerance for their customers’ most secret whims. But most of all, I remember a bookshop in which I once glanced at some rare and forbidden pamphlets, the publications of secret societies lifting the veil on tantalizing and unknown mysteries” (89).

Familiar streets transformed into a marvelous labyrinth, time extending beyond its natural limits, an esoteric ‘other world’ concealed in the midst of the ordinary and everyday ~ this is the dreamy Drohobych of Schulz’s imagination, a mythic city described in rich prose that alternately drips with the golden juices of ripe fruit or scuttles mechanically on spidery legs or entices the mind with cryptic messages of mystical import. The Street of Crocodiles is a weird and wondrous book. When Schulz was murdered at the age of fifty, shot by a Nazi soldier, the world lost a truly unique artist. As we manipulate everyday words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that we are building our houses with broken pieces of sculptures and ruined statues of gods.

In walking down The Street of Crocodiles, you take in a writer who can make the mundane into something brilliant. Shops on street corners contain wonders, vagrants become wild monsters from fairy tale nightmares. These stories slip from the limits imposed by ordinary spaces and times. This short brilliant co As we manipulate everyday words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that we are building our houses with broken pieces of sculptures and ruined statues of gods. In walking down The Street of Crocodiles, you take in a writer who can make the mundane into something brilliant. Shops on street corners contain wonders, vagrants become wild monsters from fairy tale nightmares.

These stories slip from the limits imposed by ordinary spaces and times. This short brilliant collection refers to itself, interlocks with itself, explores the labyrinths it creates.

The stories are of birds' eggs, bicycles, impassioned rants by the character's father about the all-powerful evil of the Gnostic Demiurge and the ethical treatment of tailors' dummies. These stories defy real comparison.

Their rich images and curious events make the ordinary world seem less ordinary. They make it into something greater, more mysterious, more curious. As a side note, when I went to finish this collection, I immediately turned to the Introduction to read more about what must have been a brilliant man. It was only then that I learned that Mr. Bruno Schulz was shot to death in broad daylight by the Nazis in 1942 for walking home with a loaf of bread through an 'Aryan' neighborhood. Aside from another short story collection and a few drawings and letters, that's all he ever wrote that survived.

This is a true tragedy. This goddamn book. The Street of Crocodiles tore threw me like electricity. Or enchiladas.

Or electric enchiladas. You get the picture. It is so painfully lovely, so exquisitely wrought, that you have to read it to believe the defying of gravity that Schulz accomplishes here. This rare astronaut; this martyred martian. The most immediate comparison (which I don’t know why I feel compelled to make, other than with hope that it compels someone to read it) is Calvino’s Cities. In terms o This book.

This goddamn book. The Street of Crocodiles tore threw me like electricity. Or enchiladas. Or electric enchiladas.

You get the picture. It is so painfully lovely, so exquisitely wrought, that you have to read it to believe the defying of gravity that Schulz accomplishes here. This rare astronaut; this martyred martian. The most immediate comparison (which I don’t know why I feel compelled to make, other than with hope that it compels someone to read it) is Calvino’s Cities. In terms of plot, there’s zilch in terms of similarity. They both, however, haven’t a single word out of place and each sentence seems as much a leap of faith as something that sprang from the head of a human being—a pen-clutching Athena. You can also open either to a random chapter and be transported in toto to a morphing world in that fantastical DMZ between beauty and madness.

The principal difference—and the reason that I do Schulz a disservice—is because this book has authentic pain throughout. Excuse me while I whip out my superlatives: effusive, brilliant, gorgeous, prodigious extraordinariness, virtuosic canonical genius, &c. There aren’t enough words to throw at this slim volume to even begin to hint at the grandeur inside. SoI’ll let it speak where I fail: “From that faded distance of the periphery, the city rose and grew toward the center of the map, an undifferentiated mass at first, a dense complex of blocks and houses, cut by deep canyons of streets, to become on the first plan a group of single houses, etched with the sharp clarity of a landscape seen through binoculars. In that section of the map, the engraver concentrated on the complicated and manifold profusion of streets and alleyways, the sharp lines of cornices, architraves, archivolts, and pilasters, lit by the dark gold of a late and cloudy afternoon which steeped all corners and recesses in the deep sepia of shade. The solids and prisms of that shade darkly honeycombed the ravines of streets, drowning in a warm color here half a street, there a gap between houses. They dramatized and orchestrated in a bleak romantic chiaroscuro the complex architectural polyphony.” This is the first book of the year that I will reread before it is over.

It joins the ranks of my immortal loves. For however long I’m lucky enough to convert oxygen into CO2 for plants, it will never be far from my side. If all of this sounds overly precious and gushing, trust me: The Street of Crocodiles deserves everything I have and more.

Bless you, Bruno, bless you. I kiss your eyes in the graveyard hidden beneath the earth of Europe’s shame. Reading Schulz's work is like discovering my newest, best literary friend. Bruno, I wish you had lived longer, though your tragic end might have been merciful, given the later alternatives. It was a strange end to an author of strange work. The Street of Crocodiles is a fever dream. It is the exposure of the bizarre from behind the curtain of what is 'proper'.

The setting here is every bit as much of a character as the humans, dogs, and birds we come to know: After we passed a few more houses, the Reading Schulz's work is like discovering my newest, best literary friend. Bruno, I wish you had lived longer, though your tragic end might have been merciful, given the later alternatives. It was a strange end to an author of strange work. The Street of Crocodiles is a fever dream. It is the exposure of the bizarre from behind the curtain of what is 'proper'. The setting here is every bit as much of a character as the humans, dogs, and birds we come to know: After we passed a few more houses, the street ceased to maintain any pretense of urbanity, like a man returning to his little village who, piece by piece, strips off his Sunday best, slowly changing back into a peasant as he gets closer to his home.

This abandonment of pretense is a running theme throughout these vignettes. Civility is continually stripped away to reveal the ugly, beautiful, rotting, shining underneath. Is it any wonder that the did a cinematic version of?

Take, for example, the account of madness setting into a narrator's father: Then again came days of quiet, concentrated work, interrupted by lonely monologues. While he sat there in the light of the lamp among the pillows of the large bed, and the room grew enormous as the shadows above the lampshade merged with the deep city night beyond the windows, he felt, without looking, how the pullulating jungle of wallpaper, filled with whispers, lisping and hissing, closed in around him. He heard, without looking a conspiracy of knowingly winking hidden eyes, of alert ears opening up among the flowers on the wall, of dark, smiling mouths. He then pretended to become even more engrossed in his work, adding and calculating, trying not to betray the anger which rose in him and overcoming the temptation to throw himself blindly forward with a sudden shout to grab fistfuls of those curly arabesques, or of those sheaves of eyes and ears which swarmed out from the night and grew and multiplied, sprouting, with ever-new ghostlike shoots and branches, from the womb of darkness. But Schulz is not only able to paint a wonderful visual picture again and again; he also has a keen gift for evocation by allusion, as when he describes one of his characters, Charles, meditating: One of his eyes would then slightly squint to the outside, as if leaving for another dimension.

If I knew nothing else about this character, this one line speaks volumes about Charles' motivations and inner life, while causing me to be instantly suspicious, as well as fascinated, by this one strange tic. At one step of abstraction further, we must note that Schulz not only provides mood, he describes mood in a way that draws the reader in, or, rather, infects the reader in the mind's eye: In an atmosphere of excessive facility, every whim flies high, a passing excitement swells into an empty parasitic growth; a light gray vegetation of fluffy weeds, of colorless poppies sprouts forth, made from a weightless fabric of nightmares and hashish. In a word, his work is incredible. Schulz will take you to the extremes of exhilaration and debilitating depression. His work fascinates and enthralls, like a dream from which one cannot awaken. Even in its darkest moments, I would not want to awaken from such an awe-inspiring literary dream. The 'weightless fabric of nightmares and hashish,' indeed!

I was led to this book by Cynthia Ozick because in her 501 book, (3 stars), she has a protagonist named Lars Andeming who thinks that he is the son of So when I googled Schulz, I saw that he has this book, The Street of Crocodile that is included in the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Bruno Schulz was a Polish writer who was finishing a novel entitled Messiah when he was shot by German Nazi in 1942. The manuscript has been missing sinc I was led to this book by Cynthia Ozick because in her 501 book, (3 stars), she has a protagonist named Lars Andeming who thinks that he is the son of So when I googled Schulz, I saw that he has this book, The Street of Crocodile that is included in the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Bruno Schulz was a Polish writer who was finishing a novel entitled Messiah when he was shot by German Nazi in 1942.

The manuscript has been missing since then and that was the springboard that Ozick used in her 501 novel. The Street of Crocodiles is a semi-autobiographical sketch of Schulz's life in Drohobych, Poland. It is a post-modernist fragmented novel with a distinguishable but structureless plot. When Schulz was 44 years old, he helped his fiancee in translating Franz Kafka's opus, (3 stars). This book was first published as The Cinnamon Shops in 1934, 9 years after The Trial was first published. Obviously, Kafka was one of the major influences in Schulz writing and it is apparent in this book by having the kafkaesque elements of bizarre, meaningless, hopelessness meaning no-escape situations.

The chapters appear as pieces of situations that describe the main characters: the narrator's father who stays in the basement of the house and does a lot of strange things including some kind of experiments; the house maid Adela who acts like a prima donna; the narrator's Uncle Edward who is estranged to his father but the narrator admires; and a handful of other minor characters. It could be about many things but my take is that it is a story of a boy's relationship with a strange father (who turns to a cockroach like Gregor Samsa). However, beyond all of the possible interpretations, what is most striking in Schultz's writing is his vivid and detailed description of his locales (settings). Described in his prose sounding like poetry, the books is a riveting read as you will be enthralled by the beauty of Schulz's words.

Easy short novella with mesmerizing prose that sounds like poetry. When I think about Bruno Schulz' life story, I always feel a pang in my heart. I'm known for my displays of pity regarding every living being, even trees (several nights ago, after a big storm, I found a young tree that was bent and was probably going to be cut down; I felt so sorry for it that went out, straightened it and tied it).

So it's no surprise that the unjust death of Schulz and the disappearance of his other writing provokes a dull ache in my heart, especially after having an insight When I think about Bruno Schulz' life story, I always feel a pang in my heart. I'm known for my displays of pity regarding every living being, even trees (several nights ago, after a big storm, I found a young tree that was bent and was probably going to be cut down; I felt so sorry for it that went out, straightened it and tied it). So it's no surprise that the unjust death of Schulz and the disappearance of his other writing provokes a dull ache in my heart, especially after having an insight into his wonderful mind, through The Street of Crocodiles. Reading about him, I've found out that he had no apparent influence from other writers. He lived in Drogobych all his life, being a recluse; he worked as a teacher of drawing and had a few friends, who had no idea of his literary aspirations.

It was a lucky chance that one of his pen friends encouraged him to write - it was in these letters that his stories were shaped. When Bruno Schulz's stories were reissued in Poland in 1957, translated into French and German, and acclaimed everywhere by a new generation of readers to whom he was unknown, attempts were made to place his oeuvre in the mainstream of Polish literature, to find affinities, derivations, to explain him in terms of one literary theory or another. The task is well nigh impossible. He was a solitary man, living apart, filled with his dreams, with memories of his childhood, with an intense, formidable inner life, a painter's imagination, a sensuality and responsiveness to physical stimuli which most probably could find satisfaction only in artistic creation — a volcano, smoldering silently in the isolation of a sleepy provincial town. He must have had access to some unearthly world, full of rich wonderful things, that we, normal mortals, don't have the chance to get a glimpse of, other than through the writing of Bruno Schulz and gifted writers like him. Reading The Street of Crocodiles was like having a brain orgasm: its rich metaphors were incessantly uplifting, its words caressed my mind without ever pausing.

I was constantly marveling at the poetry of Schulz' prose. This could get tiring at times, because his stories never let me breath and slack, but kept requiring my ever-present attention. The task was made even more difficult because I've read the English translation and bumped into a lot of words that I didn't know, far more than in any other book I've read so far. After tidying up, Adela would plunge the rooms into semidarkness by drawing down the linen blinds. All colors immediately fell an octave lower, the room filled with shadows, as if it had sunk to the bottom of the sea and the light was reflected in mirrors of green water — and the heat of the day began to breathe on the blinds as they stirred slightly in their daydreams. [.] Everyone in this golden day wore that grimace of heat — as if the sun had forced his worshipers to wear identical masks of gold.

Bruno Schulz is drawing inspiration from his childhood, but his writing leaves the reality at some point and wanders into imagination, blossoming into an explosion of smells and rich imagery. In the center of the stories lies Schulz' father, an almost surreal character, who gradually acquires the traits of a mythological being, wandering freely from reality into the fantastical realm. It reminded me of Danilo Kiš', where the father was also the central, elusive figure. Bruno's father is shaped as an eccentric, an almost lunatic, constantly taking an interest in peculiar things, such as the long-forgotten rooms where mold and dust had settled, creating a throbbing world that disappears the moment one opens the door.

Or the tailor's dummy that is not simply an object, but imprisoned matter, tortured matter which does not know what it is and why it is, nor where the gesture may lead that has been imposed on it for ever. He is disgusted but also fascinated by cockroaches, imitating them to the point of becoming one (this is one of his resemblances to Kafka - - although some critics say that Schulz was not actually inspired by the first). The father is presented on the brink of immediate death, but he always resurfaces with renewed energy, captivating the house once more, disturbing the peace and quiet with his follies. He is the antidote for boredom, in those days that hardened with cold and boredom like last year's loaves of bread.

One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference. At some point, the child is even convinced that his father had metamorphosed into a stuffed condor, echoing the absolutely gorgeous recount of the latter's passion for exotic birds, which were raised in the attic - one of my favorite parts of the book. Not only the father, but also the outer world is presented in a poetic manner, bordering on surreal: the rooms with their shape-shifting wallpapers, the garden with lush vegetation, the end-of-the-world storm, the family shop with oceans and rivers of cloth, the cardboard town from the Street of Crocodiles, the alluring Cinnamon Shops.

Everything in this book is a feast of senses and I don't have enough words to praise it. Perhaps the city and the marketplace had ceased to exist, and the gale and the night had surrounded our house with dark stage props and some machinery to imitate the howling, whistling and groaning. We were increasingly inclined to think that the gale was only an invention of the night, a poor representation on a confined stage of the tragic immensity, the cosmic homelessness and loneliness of the wind. You should definitely read The Street of Crocodiles, it is truly a literary gem. “The books we read in childhood don't exist anymore; they sailed off with the wind, leaving bare skeletons behind.

Whoever still has in him the memory and marrow of childhood should rewrite these books as he experienced them.” ― Bruno Schulz “My ideal goal is to 'mature' into childhood. That would be genuine maturity.” ― Bruno Schulz Bruno Schulz was a high school art teacher, an artist and a short story writer who was killed by the Gestapo when he was 50 for straying into a non-Jewish or Aryan ar “The books we read in childhood don't exist anymore; they sailed off with the wind, leaving bare skeletons behind. Whoever still has in him the memory and marrow of childhood should rewrite these books as he experienced them.” ― Bruno Schulz “My ideal goal is to 'mature' into childhood. That would be genuine maturity.” ― Bruno Schulz Bruno Schulz was a high school art teacher, an artist and a short story writer who was killed by the Gestapo when he was 50 for straying into a non-Jewish or Aryan area of his hometown of Drohobych, Poland. He was unmarried, had no children, and lived all of his life in Drohobych.

He had a pretty long term friendship with the poet Deborah Vogel, whose parents disapproved of their relationship, but his stories in The Street of Crocodiles had their beginnings in a series of letters to Vogel. “On Saturday afternoons I used to go for a walk with my mother. From the dusk of the hallway, we stepped at once into the brightness of the day. The passerby, bathed in melting gold, had their eyes half-closed against the glare, as if they were drenched with honey, upper lips were drawn back, exposing the teeth. Everyone in this golden day wore that grimace of heat–as if the sun had forced his worshippers to wear identical masks of gold. The old and the young, women and children, greeted each other with these masks, painted on their faces with thick gold paint; they smiled at each other's pagan faces–the barbaric smiles of Bacchus.” ― The Street of Crocodiles Urban, Polish, Jewish, dark laughter, lust. Roth, Malamud, Stuart Dybek’s Polish Chicago.

Thomas Mann, Kafka, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Spinoza of Market Street. Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. “Dizzy with light, we dipped into the enormous book of holidays, its pages blazing with sunshine and scented with the sweet melting pulp of golden pears.” The Street of Crocodiles Matter matters to Schulz.

He especially loves rot, fecundity, fermentation, trash, old things, antiques, things imbued through experience and ripening with memory. The memory in objects. “A cabinet of curiosities.” Each item, each object, painted alive with magic. Extra rooms emerge in houses, extra streets appear in the night. The mythicization of reality. Like Mann’s imbuing stories with classical truths/references.

Or Eliot’s objective correlative. But also surrealist transformations, like Kafka’s metamorphosis. Cockroaches figure in as equally as birds. Darkness over comes the light, finally. “Poetry happens when short circuits of sense occur between words.” ― Schulz “Nimrod began to understand that what he was experiencing was, in spite of its appearance of novelty, something which had existed before–many times before. His body began to recognize situations, impressions, and objects.

In reality, none of these astonished him very much. Faced with new circumstances, he would dip into the fount of his memory, the deep-seated memory of the body, would search blindly and feverishly, and often find ready made within himself a suitable reaction: the wisdom of generations, deposited in his plasma, in his nerves.

He found actions and decisions of which he had not been aware but which had been lying in wait, ready to emerge.” ― Crocodiles Magic matters to Schulz. Matter is made of magic, at its best. Mirages, fata morgana. Surrealism, magical realism, mesmerism, a kind of early Steam Punk fascination that modernism had with science, with physics and its possible relationship to metaphysics. A fascination with “essence” and the ability of the artist to “capture” the “nature of reality”.

Ecstasy in the every day. And invention. The role of the demiurge in the forging of reality. Manifestations of the Unknown.

Joy and pain issues forth from this magic. Horror emerges out of fantasy. It can go either way, into light or darkness, but it is magic, either way. “My father was slowly fading, wilting before our eyes.” - Crocodiles The father in this story as mad, crazy genius, but mad. Comic madness alternating with despair, a kind of bipolar alteration, story to story. “August” is ecstasy, “Visitation:” despair.

Dark laughter. “The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year's loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.” ― Crocodiles “Even in the depths of sleep, in which he had to satisfy his need for protection and love by curling himself up into a trembling ball, he could not rid himself of the feeling of loneliness and homelessness.”― Crocodiles Odd vignettes, ephemera, anecdotes. No sense of 'wholeness' or 'the well-shaped Freytag's Pyramid' as in The Art of the Short Story. There’s almost dialogue in any of the stories.

Except when Father pontificates his views of the world. The stories are all narrated, reported, instead of enacted. Not much happens. Animals talk. Birds are everywhere. Father becomes one of his birds. But it’s not about plot; it’s about magic.

'The sun-dried thistles shout, the plantains swell and boast their shameless flesh, the weeds salivate with glistening poison... ' ― Crocodiles A fascination with maps, labyrinths, but not as sense-making tools. Patterns ending in wonder, not an articulation of order. It's more important to get lost than find your way. The best stories include “Birds,” “Cinnamon Shops,” “The Street of Crocodiles,” “The Night of the Great Season,” and “The Comet.” Here's an excerpt of the Quay Brothers's The Street of Crocodiles stop action film. Just intermittently rereading one of my absolute favorites.

If you haven't read this collection (which includes Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass) do yourself a favor and read one of the great books. Schulz's sketches are equally great.

Here is a lovely website dedicated to his art & writing.and if you don't know Schulz's fate, read his wiki-biography or whatever, but be prepared for some genuine 20th century tragedy. The first recorded Polish sente Just intermittently rereading one of my absolute favorites. If you haven't read this collection (which includes Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass) do yourself a favor and read one of the great books. Schulz's sketches are equally great. Here is a lovely website dedicated to his art & writing.and if you don't know Schulz's fate, read his wiki-biography or whatever, but be prepared for some genuine 20th century tragedy. The first recorded Polish sentence translates to something like 'Let me grind, and you take a rest'.

Prophetic seeing the way the country was epically ground into the earth by the forces of history. But when you look at the astounding output of literature and art that survived and still today is finding a growing audience(Milosz, Gombrowicz, Wat, Herbert, Stanislaw Lem, Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, Szymborska, Jerzy Pilch, on & on), it is just another affirmation of the true heroism of the artist, and the life-sustaining nature of creative works.

A volume of Bruno Schulz stories is like an impossibly delicious and ornate gateau; it's impossible to eat the whole thing at once. (Although this didn't take me as long to read as the dates above may suggest: it was more like a fortnight's worth of days, in two phases separated by eleven months.) But it's also not simply the feast of sweetmeats and beauty that this collection's more fitting, original Polish title, Cinnamon Shops may suggest: in among the glittering decorations are also, if you A volume of Bruno Schulz stories is like an impossibly delicious and ornate gateau; it's impossible to eat the whole thing at once. (Although this didn't take me as long to read as the dates above may suggest: it was more like a fortnight's worth of days, in two phases separated by eleven months.) But it's also not simply the feast of sweetmeats and beauty that this collection's more fitting, original Polish title, Cinnamon Shops may suggest: in among the glittering decorations are also, if you look more closely, alarmingly sinister, creepy gothic ones.

A couple of years ago, I said a lot of what I'd still say about Schulz, in the second half of, along with some favourite quotes, in reviewing a novella about him which also reprinted a couple of his stories - and which, finally, belatedly, got me reading him. (I'd known of Schulz for a long time, but as mentioned there, had always been put off by the title The Street of Crocodiles, combined with the seriousness and slight sadism of the black and white illustration on the front of the recent Penguin Classics editions. I'd have gone instead for side of his drawing style, for it's lovely combination of realism and what might now be called chibi-ness, and which matches the caricature-like, fantastical nature of his metamorphoses of family and friends into his fictional characters. Its childlike-ness is far nearer the essence of the book than the fetishy foot-in-the-face of the Penguin choice.) The couple of stories I'd previously read, 'Birds' and 'Cinnamon Shops', contained much of the essence of Schulz's fiction, but a few things were new to me in reading the whole Street of Crocodiles volume. (This was just his first collection of stories I read, not one of the editions that confusingly combines it with Sanatorium Under the Hourglass while still using the earlier title.) One is how Adela, the maid, is the calm centre of the household who restores balance and order - I was always so glad when she bustled into view - in contrast to the fantastically eccentric parents whose establishment it technically is. After reading 'Nimrod' and 'Cockroaches' I understand more about why Schulz is compared to Kafka as a writer, and not just as a personality. That Schulz came up with these two stories without having read 'Investigations of a Dog' or 'Metamorphosis' shows, I think, how each author was a lightning rod for certain features in the culture of his times and region, drawn by their similar character traits.

(I don't think Kafka was so widely known, nor that mass media communications were so good, that Schulz might have picked up the essence of the stories without having read them, as one might nowadays.) 'Cockroaches' is one of a number of stories or mere sentences that seem to prefigure elements of the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust which would kill the author less than ten years after the book was published. Granted, many if not most classic novels from the 1920s and 30s contain the occasional nod to the forms of racism and eugenicism which were pervasive and prevalent at the time, and perhaps I found some of it more poignant and sad than elsewhere because of Schulz's own fate. He was not immune, for how would he necessarily know to be, to making an unflattering description of effeminate men and dark-skinned ladies (in the title story); and for a Jewish man in 1933 to have written of a member of his own family turning into a cockroach feels far more obviously and frighteningly illustrative of insults that we can readily assume existed in the streets and printed media than it does in 1915. (Yet it's not as if there wasn't also violent antisemitism then; the dark clouds of history just make one see differently.) Then there is the uncle stripped of his personality (by stringent psychoanalysis, a dig at Freudians, perhaps?) made functional, mechanical, a Taylorist's dream: into a doorbell.

Perhaps most chilling were parts of 'The Comet': One day my brother, on his return from school, brought the improbable and yet true news of the imminent end of the world. Type Of Gypsum Board Pdf Reader there. We asked him to repeat it, thinking that we had misheard. Unready and unfinished, just as it was, at a random point in time and space, without closing its accounts, without having reached any goal, in mid-sentence as it were, without a period or exclamation mark, without a last judgement or God's Wrath - in an atmosphere of friendly understanding, loyally, by mutual agreement and in accordance with rules observed by both parties - the world was to be hit on the head, simply and irrevocably. Several pages later (though still mid story) they marked the paths of a sleepy cosmography, while, in reality, black as soot, they succumbed to a planetary lethargy, as if they had put their heads into the fireplace, the final goal of all those blind flights.

I cannot but hear, here, the bewildering stasis of the man who (like Hungarian Antal Szerb), depite no shortage of offers to get him and his great talent to safety, remained in his hometown as the Nazis took over and was eventually murdered as a result. Celina Wieniewska's original translation of Schulz still appears to be the only one in print, and I can see why; it is beautiful reading in English, it still feels right alongside modern traditions of fantasy, fairytale retellings and the gothic - at least for someone who can't read the original, it seems no improvement is required - and the only thing out of place to the contemporary eye, used to new translations, is that many characters' names are anglicised.

Despite what I may have said in the last few paragraphs What this book is not: depressing Holocaust lit; cold, dry, serious East European SF (I used to think it would be, the way I imagine the Strugatskys); continually or frequently ugly; pinched and cornered and paranoid and stressful like Kafka (I don’t enjoy Kafka, sorry). It is: deliciously language- and metaphor-rich, it is fantastical, it is often escapist, it is fun (if your idea of fun can include the occasional bit of queasy Gothicism).

Schulz is better known than he was, but there are still friends who haven’t read him whom I think would love this. He’s not for absolutely everyone, but he’s the sort of writer whose work you want to actively press on those you think would enjoy it, it’s so wonderful.

'Today those remote dreams come back, and not without reason. The possibility suggests itself that no dreams, however absurd or senseless, are wasted in the universe. Embedded in the dream is a hunger for its own reification, a demand that imposes an obligation on reality and that grows imperceptibly into a bona fide claim, an IOU clamoring for payment. We have long since abandoned our dreams of that fortress, but here, years later, someone turns up who picks them up and takes them seriously, so 'Today those remote dreams come back, and not without reason. The possibility suggests itself that no dreams, however absurd or senseless, are wasted in the universe. Embedded in the dream is a hunger for its own reification, a demand that imposes an obligation on reality and that grows imperceptibly into a bona fide claim, an IOU clamoring for payment.

We have long since abandoned our dreams of that fortress, but here, years later, someone turns up who picks them up and takes them seriously, someone ingenuous and true of heart who understood them literally, took them for coin of the realm, and treated them as things that were plain, unproblematic. I have seen this person, I have spoken with him.' (320) 5 stars for Cinnamon Shops (The Street of Crocodiles), 3 stars for the rest.

In the justly celebrated Crocodiles, the evocation of a fabulist somnolence is of the highest order. I really can't say more or less.

I have grown into someone less ingenuous, (though I hope not less true of heart) and so felt the textured-pavers-musical-notation as night writing, obscuring symbols. Schulz's later stuff, which was actually written first, seems less polished by contrast, yet is certainly worth reading, if even as a process of grieving for what might have been. Sum=fever dream I relish in retrospect. Even in this volume's overture, 'August', an insatiable suction into the hallucinatory blind-bright swarming-dark fetid verdant depths of summer, even then at the very start the sheer overcrowded prose-intensity of this 'Polish Kafka' seemed to be surpassing anything I'd encountered from the primary Czech Kafka. And then it just goes from there, and goes and goes, through automatons and comets, labyrinths and stork-swarms.

I've seen this sort of reeling mythic recollection attempted many times, Even in this volume's overture, 'August', an insatiable suction into the hallucinatory blind-bright swarming-dark fetid verdant depths of summer, even then at the very start the sheer overcrowded prose-intensity of this 'Polish Kafka' seemed to be surpassing anything I'd encountered from the primary Czech Kafka. And then it just goes from there, and goes and goes, through automatons and comets, labyrinths and stork-swarms. I've seen this sort of reeling mythic recollection attempted many times, but never so purely, so vividly, so hauntingly. This is astounding writing.

Some quotes from the first bit, which is basically all one notable quote of dimly perfect fever-nostalgia at the hidden cusp of adolescence*: The dark second-floor appartment of the house in Market Square was shot through each day by the naked heat of summer: the silence of the shimmering streaks of air, the squares of brightness dreaming their intense dreams on the floor; the sound of a barrel organ rising from the deepest golden vein of day; two or three bars of a chorus, played on a distant piano over and over again, melting in the sun on the white pavement, lost in the fire of high noon. (p.3) But on the other side of the fence, behind that jungle of summer in which the stupidity of weeds reigned unchecked, there was a rubbish heap on which thistles grew in wild profusion. No one knew that there, on that refuse dump, the month of August had chosen to hold that year its pagan orgies. There pushed against the fence and hidden by the elders, stood the bed of the half-wit girl, Touya, as we all called her.

On a heap of discarded junk of old saucepans, abandoned single shoes, and chunks of plaster, stood a bed, painted green, propped up on two bricks where one leg was missing. The air over that midden, wild with the heat, cut through by the lightning of shiny horseflies, driven mad by the sun, crackled as if filled with invisible rattles, exciting one to a frenzy. (p.6) In a straw-filled chest lay the foolish Maria, white as a wafer and motionless like a glove from which a hand had been withdrawn. And, as if taking advantage of her sleep, the silence talked, the yellow, bright, evil silence delivered its monolgue, argued, and loudly spoke its vulgar maniacal soliloquy. Maria's time -- the time imprisoned in her soul -- had left her and -- terribly real -- filled the room, vociferous and hellish in the bright silence of the morning, rising from the noisy mill of the clock like a cloud of bad flour, powdery flour, the stupid flour of madmen. (p.7) This is a review of just the stories first published as Street of Crocodiles; though I look forward to continuing shortly with his only other published book, also published here, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. *do you ever find yourself trying to describe something in a pale shadow of its own terms?

I can barely help it. Forgive my critical excesses here, they seem to be the irresistible aftereffect of a brush with Schulz's words. Every unique author is unique in his own way And Bruno Schulz is one of the inarguable proofs. “The Demiurge has had no monopoly of creation, for creation is the privilege of all spirits.

Matter has been given infinite fertility, inexhaustible vitality, and, at the same time, a seductive power of temptation which invites us to create as well. In the depth of matter, indistinct smiles are shaped, tensions build up, attempts at form appear. The whole of matter pulsates with infinite possibilities Every unique author is unique in his own way And Bruno Schulz is one of the inarguable proofs. “The Demiurge has had no monopoly of creation, for creation is the privilege of all spirits. Matter has been given infinite fertility, inexhaustible vitality, and, at the same time, a seductive power of temptation which invites us to create as well. In the depth of matter, indistinct smiles are shaped, tensions build up, attempts at form appear.

The whole of matter pulsates with infinite possibilities that send dull shivers through it. Waiting for the life-giving breath of the spirit, it is endlessly in motion. It entices us with a thousand sweet, soft, round shapes which it blindly dreams up within itself.” And a man created a mannequin And which is much more important man created literature and peopled it with all kinds of sentient mannequins. “On that map, made in the style of baroque panoramas, the area of the Street of Crocodiles shone with the empty whiteness that usually marks polar regions or unexplored countries of which almost nothing is known. The lines of only a few streets were marked in black and their names given in simple, unadorned lettering, different from the noble script of the other captions.

The cartographer must have been loath to include that district in the city and his reservations found expression in the typographical treatment.” And miracles happen there because for a child everything that happens is a miracle full of magical mystery. Few Questions and Answers: 1. Can a simple ordinary fact of a normal day, become a superb piece of literature?

For instance, the first act of barking of a puppy - can there be anything interesting to describe it? Not to say anything of four pages of pure pleasure and in the form of a 'short story'. Schulz does it very easily. Can language be intoxicating? The language intoxicates you and results in high voltage creations of hallucinations.

An example: In the middle of the day, when the sun was Few Questions and Answers: 1. Can a simple ordinary fact of a normal day, become a superb piece of literature? For instance, the first act of barking of a puppy - can there be anything interesting to describe it? Not to say anything of four pages of pure pleasure and in the form of a 'short story'. Schulz does it very easily.

Can language be intoxicating? The language intoxicates you and results in high voltage creations of hallucinations. An example: In the middle of the day, when the sun was relatively shining well I was reading a narration of a wintry night from this book and at the end of my reading I was fully convinced of the book than the real climate outside of my window! Can an event be 're-lived' according to your childhood imaginations? Schulz will help you live it. What were your childhood ideas regarding the candy shops or shops with exotic items?

How did you view the same shops in the night when they were filled with colourful lights? Read Schulz and you will know exactly how you had imagined them as a Child.

Can a person be so simple and at the same time very profound? An apparently simple narration suddenly turns into a narration with many significance. For instance, Schulz in six or eight pages creates a story that resembles and gives the same effect as Kafka's Metamorphosis. This book was a gift from a friend. And I am grateful to that friend for introducing Schulz. Some people truly know how to give gifts. This book is completely delirious.

Every inanimate object is alive in some horrid, pulsing way: the night seethes with stars, the floriated wallpaper opens eyes and strains ears to spy on the family in their cavernous, dusty rooms, while what we think of as reality is an enormous empty theater. Only the scene immediately before us retains its characteristics while everywhere our gaze does not fall is crumbling as we speak into decay and plaster and sawdust, unable to keep its form without our co This book is completely delirious. Every inanimate object is alive in some horrid, pulsing way: the night seethes with stars, the floriated wallpaper opens eyes and strains ears to spy on the family in their cavernous, dusty rooms, while what we think of as reality is an enormous empty theater. Only the scene immediately before us retains its characteristics while everywhere our gaze does not fall is crumbling as we speak into decay and plaster and sawdust, unable to keep its form without our concentration. Equally disturbing is Schulz's work as an artist.

I wish the stories were packaged with his illustrations! A strange and magical experience. The small stories in this book are language-drunk, old-world-surrealism, the emphasis on the weird life of objects, and a father who at various times turns into a bird, saves the world, forgets his wallet, pursues the maid, creates a world out of bolts of cloth, and--of course! Becomes a cockroachthe Mittel-Europa city that morphs and morphs again Only the maid never changes from story to story.

A vanished world, a child's wavering sense of reality, a street o A strange and magical experience. The small stories in this book are language-drunk, old-world-surrealism, the emphasis on the weird life of objects, and a father who at various times turns into a bird, saves the world, forgets his wallet, pursues the maid, creates a world out of bolts of cloth, and--of course! Becomes a cockroachthe Mittel-Europa city that morphs and morphs again Only the maid never changes from story to story. A vanished world, a child's wavering sense of reality, a street of magic which cannot always be found and then appears when you're lost it is quite the Chagall world, with a darker undertow of contagion and panic, leavened with whimsy. The stories don't seem 'finished' in any conventional sense, but explode like flash-paper before the settle to the ground in a heap of glitter. Coruscating and mysterious, they remind me at times of Fernando del Paso's word-drunk Palinuro of Mexico as much as Kafka. Another book from Les Plesko's incredible reading list, it was a favorite of his..

“Can you understand,' asked my father, 'the deep meaning of that weakness, that passion for colored tissue, for papier-mache, for distemper, for oakum and sawdust? This is,' he continued with a pained smile, 'the proof of our love for matter as such, for its fluffiness or porosity, for its unique mystical consistency. Demiurge, that great master and artist, made matter invisible, made it disappear under the surface of life. We, on the contrary, love its creaking, its resistance, its clumsiness. We like to see behind each gesture, behind each move, its inertia, its heavy effort, its bearlike awkwardness.” —.

This article needs additional citations for. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2013) () Witold Gombrowicz Born Witold Marian Gombrowicz ( 1904-08-04)August 4, 1904, Died July 24, 1969 ( 1969-07-24) (aged 64), France Occupation Novelist, dramatist, diarist Language Polish Nationality Polish Alma mater Notable works Website Witold Marian Gombrowicz (August 4, 1904 – July 24, 1969) was a Polish writer and.

His works are characterised by deep psychological analysis, a certain sense of paradox and absurd, anti-nationalist flavor. In 1937 he published his first novel,, which presented many of his usual themes: the problems of immaturity and youth, the creation of identity in interactions with others, and an ironic, critical examination of class roles in Polish society and culture. He gained fame only during the last years of his life, but is now considered one of the foremost figures of. His diaries were published in 1969 and are, according to the, 'widely considered his masterpiece'.