Bruno Schulz (1)Reviews

As I couldn't remember this book at all, I reread it and now I get it why I forgot it so completely. It's beautiful - it's a bit like reading a very long and mysterious poem in prose, but it was a book about nothing. There are some eccentric members of family, some strange neighbours, some more or less important objects, some half-cooked love story, a bit of magic - all this mixed togethed and served in a wonderful poem-prose. I've just finished reading it and I already don't remember most of it.

Definitely not for me and I'm not going to read this book ever again.

Genuinely weird and wild, this book felt like a series of impeccably rendered and intense childhood dreams.

Personal 3 stars only because it's such a strongly visual book and I struggle with appreciating written imagery a lot of the time. The book is very dream-like: most stories are a journey from one extremely detailed surreal image of a scene to another, following a dream logic where the ending bears little relation to the start and there's very limited plot. Some of the scenes were very effective for me and stuck in my mind and the overall evocation of a particular city in a particular time is really powerful and realistic even as it's done through fantasy imagery. It's definitely an experience.

In the last story, The Comet, there was a particularly effective short scene where a relative submits to being turned into... a doorbell(?). I'll leave a little quote which struck me.

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. Was he happy? One would ask that question in vain. A question like this makes sense only when applied to creatures who are rich in alternative possibilities, so that the actual truth can be contrasted with partly real probabilities and reflect itself in them. But Uncle Edward had no alternatives; the dichotomy "happy/unhappy" did not exist for him because he had been completely integrated. One had to admit to a grudging approval when one saw how punctually, how accurately he was functioning. Even his wife, Aunt Teresa, who followed him to our city, could not stop herself from pressing the button quite often, in order to hear that loud and sonorous sound in which she recognized the former timbre of her husband's voice in moments of irritation.

Bruno Schulz's prose is rich with poetic imagery. His dreamlike surreal pace of this fictional autobiography could be considered an extended prose poem as well as a collection of short stories. Moving at a languid pace with dreamlike logic, it will unexpectedly turn into a frenzy of absurd brilliance, and along the way the author drops hints that all this is not as it seems.

For example, in the story “Cockroaches,” the protagonist confronts his mother about his eccentric deceased father’s remains. It starts with a description of stuffed condor that’s a bit worse for wear. His mother is reclining, suffering from a migraine, nevertheless he confronts her with the frank question: “I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time: it is he isn’t it?” indicating the stuffed bird.

She accuses him of spreading stories and lies. Then she goes on to remind him of his father’s obsession with cockroaches that drove him into such a state that he became one and then flew apart into a swarm of them and scuttled off into the woodwork. He does remember all this.
“And yet, I say disconcerted, “I am sure that this condor is he.”

My mother looked at me from under her eyelashes.

“Don’t torture me darling; I have told you already that Father is away, traveling all over the country: he now has a job as a commercial traveler. You know that he sometimes come home at night and goes away again before dawn.”

In the following stories, his father, very much alive, is still with them, conducting experiments with electricity that apparently turns his brother-in-law into an electric bell that disintegrates just as the comet that about to destroy the world approaches Earth.

I had high hopes for this book since it was mentioned in another Boxall's List book. I was very disappointed. While the metaphors are amazing, that is all that this book consists of. It's like reading a chronicle of nightmares. Not for me.

This volume collects together all of the short stories written by Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer who lived and died in Drohobych, now Ukraine, 1892-1942. Some of the stories, especially the earlier ones, are difficult to navigate, the thread of the story itself lost in a miasma of descriptive whirling. I felt often as though I was being told a fever dream, and there were times when I felt my own temperature soaring out of control.

But the effect works well to disorient, and the Sanatorium under the sign of the Hourglass is arguably his masterwork - no other tale of insanity that I have ever read works in quite the same way.

This is a collection of Schulz's writing, yet works almost like a complete, though fractured, novel - Father wanders these pages, from start to finish, and so too does the mysterious Adela, and there are frequent references to the shop on the market square; you could be readily forgiven for thinking these stories contributed to one theme, to one long, expansive novel. If you are going to read Schulz, this is the volume to opt for, with a magnificently patient rendering from the Polish by Madeline G. Levine.

Schulz was shot by a Gestapo officer in 1942. One can only wonder what literary treasures were destroyed by that thoughtless act.

Bruno Schulz spent most of his life as a school art teacher in the Galician town of Drohobycz (now Drohobych, Ukraine). He published two collections of Polish short stories in the 1930s, as well as a few uncollected stories, all included in this Penguin Classics collection, together with many of Schulz's own illustrations. His other unpublished manuscripts, said to have included a novel, were all lost during the war, but that small body of published work has been enough to make him an influential writer. Schulz was murdered by a Nazi officer in 1942.

I picked this up rather expecting quaint little stories of small-town life in Mitteleuropa, but it turns out to be something quite different. Schulz was clearly heavily influenced by (at least) Kafka, Thomas Mann, and the surrealists, and his stories, although they usually start out from the bourgeois domesticity of the Schulz family in Drohobycz ca. 1900, invariably branch away from realism into dream worlds in which the narrator's draper father becomes a heroic figure locked in a quixotic struggle against the constraints of sanity (on occasion turning into an arthropod or being sent to a Magic-Mountainish sanatorium), the maidservant Adela turns into every kind of female archetype, the narrator seems to switch constantly between adult, adolescent and small child (in one story he is an old-age pensioner who enrols in primary school), and the town itself shifts shape in all sorts of unpredictable ways.

This all comes with inventive (over-)rich visual descriptions, often seeming to borrow techniques from the cinema of the times, and all kinds of dreamlike category-changes, when seasons or places or trains develop personalities, waxwork figures and tailor's dummies come to life, and members of the Hapsburg family turn up uninvited.

Very strange and fascinating, definitely something I'm going to have to re-read soon.

But, once again, this makes me sad about what has happened to Penguin Classics. They still have the smart black cover designs I remember from forty years ago, but the insides have turned into a mush of smudgy ink crookedly printed on translucent paper that is creased before you even get the book home from the shop. What are they thinking?

This book is either a novel, or more likely, a collection of semi-interconnected stories, some more connected than others. Joseph, his father, and sister Adela are recurring characters. In general people react with seemingly normal responses to things only to wander into surreal Shandean digressions which may or may not take the reader eventually back to "reality." Most of the action is driven by what appears to be the characters' subconscious, for lack of any other better motivation. This may be reading too much into it and the purely surreal may be what the author is primarily striving for. Many bizarre transformations also abound.

At times I felt like I was a prisoner in a cross between a Luis Bunuel film and Eraserhead, not necessarily a bad thing. Images are striking and vivid and despite what I've said, cogent metaphors do pepper the text. I found this, despite the bizarre nature of the book, a rather easy read. Don't let your mind wander because the story doesn't always follow a linear path and you may find you don't know what happened a few pages ago and won't be able to reconstruct it just from the context.

There is also an excellent screen adaptation of The Street of Crocodiles by the Quay Brothers.

This is a book I picked up at the description on the back. I knew nothing of the author, topics, etc. And I'm glad I did. I wasn't expecting much, but this is a book that sits on the edge of magical realism, surrealism, and life. The original language is Polish, and I can't compare the translation, but this English version, translated by Celina Wieniewska, is magical. Descriptions of light is incredible, and it manages to capture the magicalness of changes of seasons, weather, time. As always in a collection, some stories are better than others.

The introduction in this Penguin Classic edition adds to the story. Schulz led a fairly quiet life, that was cut short by a Nazi Officer.

I highly recommend this volume of stories.

This book was first published, in Polish, in 1934. It began as a series of letters from the reclusive Schulz to a friend, Deborah Vogel. Only two books by Schultz were published before he was murdered by the Gestapo in 1942. His novel, The Messiah, and his unpublished writings were lost.

Schulz's descriptions are like paintings, but more, because the objects are active and sounds, movement and colours all play a part.

"The dark second-floor apartment 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 a 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."

It's impossible to classify this book. It is a comic memoir with Schulz as the young narrator and his eccentric father as the main character. It is a fantasy of the end of the world, an elegy to the death of a Galician town and its way of life. In parts it makes no sense, but if you let the words wash over you, there is meaning all the same.

I really enjoyed this book, though it is not at all the sort of thing I usually read. I got lost, and had to re-read many paragraphs and pages, but because the book is so short there is no rush to reach the end.½

This is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read.

This was like looking at one long autumn oil painting in minute detail, inch by inch, as it passes very slowly before your eyes at the same time the sounds and smells of autumn drift in through an open window.

Reading this book clearly brought to mind the many other books that I have read that have tried to do this but failed disappointingly without me ever realising or knowing that there was one book that had managed to pull off this seemingly impossible feat of a physical sense of beauty being manifested by words.

A rare book that I started and didn't finish. It starts strong. The first few stories are filled with beautiful images and innovative uses of the language that promise at great things to come. But even from the first stories, I noticed that they were almost all setting, with very little character building. He seemed to be setting a stage, and I assumed that later characters would come to inhabit this stage. Unfortunately, when the characters do show up, they are very thin and two dimensional. Schulz even references this in a story called "A Treatise on Tailor's Dummies" where he talks about a second genesis, and how the new race of men will only be created to serve a single purpose, some to only utter a single word, and there will be no need to fill in anything beyond this single purpose. It's sort of a prose cubism; he has sentences and paragraphs that give the basic shapes of a character, but they are ultimately flat and abstract.

The utter lack of plots in the stories eventually wore me down. It's a pity that such great prose wasn't linked to something more substantive.

I'm not smart enough to understand anything that happened here.

Collected Stories by Bruno Schulz is a collection of short stories comprised of two published works and additional uncollected stories. Schulz was a Polish Jewish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher. He is regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award.

There are two things that make this collection great. The first is the writing style. Schulz is perhaps the only readily known Polish modernist in the West. It takes only a short time before the reader is drawn into the minds of the characters. The settings gain importance over the concept of plot and are rich in imagery. The imagery is not only found in the great things but also in the mundane like fish in aspic. The characters get the same treatment:

What remained of him was a small amount of corporeal casing and that
handful of senseless eccentricities—they could disappear one day, as unnoticed
as the gray pile of trash collecting in a corner that Adela carried out
every day to the garbage bin.

The second thing that makes this collection significant is the translation work by Madeline G. Levine. Levine is Kenan Professor of Slavic Literatures Emerita at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her translations from Polish include The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories by Hanna Krall, Bread for the Departed by Bogdan Wojdowski, and four volumes of prose by Czesław Miłosz. The introduction documents the checking and rechecking by another party of the translation. The goal is to capture the essence and accuracy of the original language. The proper use of translation, even if sometimes unwieldy in English or using words that are not in common use, like hill-lock hump, adds depth and accuracy to reading and concentrates the reader's effort and attention.

Collected Stories offers the reader a look inside of Polish fiction of the modernist period. There are many similarities in the writing to Woolf's later poetic prose. Stream of consciousness plays out through the stories. As many of the stories take place in the past, the effects of memory play an important role in the storytelling much like in Proust. Talking to an acquaintance who was born and raised in Poland, Schulz is wonderful and read by most in high school. After reading this collection, I would definitely agree with the wonderful.

On reading these stories through only once, I didn't really get much from them beyond a sense of having been raped by adjectives. It was after a second reading that this book came alive in utterly devastating ways. I have no doubt that I would likely get even more out of subsequent readings.

Schulz is certainly the kind of author who can haunt you in unexpected ways long after you thought you finished reading his work.

On reading these stories through only once, I didn't really get much from them beyond a sense of having been raped by adjectives. It was after a second reading that this book came alive in utterly devastating ways. I have no doubt that I would likely get even more out of subsequent readings.

Schulz is certainly the kind of author who can haunt you in unexpected ways long after you thought you finished reading his work.

Unbelievable. Totally perfect in that crazy Borges/Kafka way, but denser. Read it right now.

Weird and probably wonderful. The translation was so overstuffed with adjectives that it felt overwritten although the original intention may well have been a heightened and overwrought reality. Denser and harder to read than I had anticipated, this was unsettling but not in a creepy way.

This less anovel than a collection of oddities, a freakish notebook of squirming detail. There was an association to be made between Schulz's "father" in the novel and the Father in Kafka's The Judgement.

Unhappy Philosopher: "The Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno Schulz

(Original Review, 1981-05-30)

Why do I read? To learn, to experience worlds, emotions, interactions that I don't experience in my reality, to think, to be, to become.

If not for Huxley - recommended by an English teacher at school - I'd have remained a working class racist, sexist homophobe, would never have smoked haxixe, gone on to study philosophy, met my children's mother, have had wonderful kids or stepped out of a culture of impoverished imagination.
I might have been 'a happy pig' rather than an "unhappy philosopher," (to paraphrase Plato) it's true, but it's been a richer life for it. Reading still throws utterly unexpected poetry and beauty at me, as with some of the lines from 'Street of Crocodiles' by Bruno Schulz, which is a wonderful if not easy read. It really is risible to see a bunch of non-Polish speakers bemoaning a translation because, well, it makes for difficult English! Well, trying reading Schulz in Polish as that’s same friend who speaks Polish told me - it ain't easy, either, for a Polish speaker! His prose is frequently florid, too much, heavy, creaking but then bursts into levity and flight, that is the joy and surprise of his work - transformation, not only within the scenes, but within the writing itself (the same can be applied to Saramago…).

And I also despair of critics and readers (and this happens in book reviews every week) who comment on the quality of a translation without having a working knowledge of both languages. The problem is that when reviewing work in translation it's considered polite to comment on the translator, and if you've enjoyed the book it naturally follows that you'll want to compliment the translator on the job they've done. It's a bit of a nonsense, but it's usually born of good intentions as opposed to wanting to make people believe you spend your spare time reading Chekhov and Proust in the original. [2018 EDIT: That's why I only do it when I've read the original which invariably only happens when the language to and from involves Portuguese, English, Spanish or German.]

I read because it's in the blood. There is no greater love (or as a friend of mine usually says: "To avoid eye contact with that creepy guy on the subway.").

Bruno Schulz obviously read a lot of Kafka.

Why does everyone love this guy so much? Sure, he writes beautifully and poetically, but he's not saying anything that hasn't been said before (even in 1934). I could be hideously wrong, but it seems to me that the bulk of Schulz's literary fame stems from his death. What a grotesque and lovely picture, that of a gifted writer shot dead by a Nazi bullet.

Astounding prose in these set pieces, often hallucinatory and dreamlike but with very real characters. Schulz was an original writer.

It’s not often I find myself agreeing with Jonathan Safran Foer (it’s not often I find anything he says interesting enough to take issue with either way, but that’s besides the point), but when he says he loved this book but didn’t like it, I kind of know what he means.

Read the full review on The Lectern

E, come il miele, è da prendere a piccole dosi altrimenti stufa.
Comunque a tratti sembra di leggere Kafka. E non credo ci possa essere apprezzamento migliore da fare per un'opera letteraria.

This one started off very well with spectactularly rich prose full of well chosen baroque metaphores. About halfway it tended to become repetitious and the stories were without plot, becoming a type of style excercises and giving the impression of paintings in words (the author is a famous painter). In all a discovery, to be read with pauses in between.