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Title: The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, Celina Wieniewski ISBN: 0-14-018625-5 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: January, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Remarkable
Comment: I hadn't heard of Bruno Schulz until, in the mid 1990s, I saw Simon McBurney's Theatre de Complicite play based on this novel.
The book's characters are unbelievably haunting, despite its complete lack of dialogue. No wonder Polish writer Bruno Schulz is best known for this novel, though it is little more than 120 pages. It is easily one of the most poetic and riveting novels of the 20th century. It was also Schulz' first. It was published in 1934 as "Cinnamon Shops."
Schulz was an artist before he was a writer. And in this novel, he paints with his words. (He had come to writing in thanks partly to the encouragement of the poet Deborah Vogel.)
The novel opens with a scene from his family home. In July, when his father had gone "to take the waters," Schulz was left with his mother and elder brother, "prey to the blinding white heat of the summer days." Together, they dipped into a large volume of "holidays, its pages blazing with sunshine and scented with the sweet melting pulp of golden pears." On luminous mornings, his mother Adela returned from the market "like Pomona emerging from the flames of day." Everything that follows is a sensory feast.
Schulz' images are sometimes surreal and the events of the book, bizarre and often amazing. His father, for example, being enamored of birds, virtually becomes one. He moves into the attic where birds of prey visit.
The first edition was illustrated by several of Schulz' masterful drawings and etchings, made in his earlier artistic mode, all of them reproduced elsewhere. One entitled "The Table" illustrated a scene at the family house which the book elegantly retells.
Born on July 12, 1892, Schulz was the third and youngest child of a merchant who lived and worked in Drohobycz his whole life. This novel, like all his artistic and written works, reflects his close connection to his family and place. It is filled with his uncles, aunts and cousins, though one can never tell precisely where the reality stops and the fantasy begins. The lines are seamless, as in an exquisite pastel.
In 1939, the Soviets occupied eastern Poland. Schulz' friends helped him to stay in Drohobycz, though he could no longer teach. But in June 1941 when the Nazis occupied eastern Poland, Schulz was forced to live with the Viennese Nazi Felix Landau, who had a taste for art. Landau boasted of keeping a Jewish artist slave alive--on one daily bowl of soup and slice of bread. Schulz survived Landau's "protection" for a year. But, as the introduction notes, the Gestapo went on a rampage on Nov. 19, 1942, killing more than 150. Karl Guenther, a rival to Landau, shot Schulz in the head. A devoted friend buried him at night in a Jewish cemetery which has since disappeared, along with Schulz' grave.
Schulz entrusted most of his writings to friends for safekeeping during the war. Most were also snuffed out, and his works lost.
The true extent of his genius will probably never be known. We are fortunate that this book emerged from Poland before Schulz' world was consumed in flames Alyssa A. Lappen
Rating: 5
Summary: Amazing.
Comment: Bruno Schulz's fictional world is as strange, unique, and fascinating as any you'll ever encounter. He builds each story from a physical, natural detail or a phenomena, and imbues it with such hypnotic and poetic intensity, that what should be an ordinary world is transformed into a dream-drunk and febrile one. There is no gratuitous surrealistic maneuver, but an original world view, and this alone, would you agree, is a rare and treasurable thing in literature.
The stories all deal with the narrator (Bruno) and his family when Bruno was a child. Each story starts out with a beautiful description of the milieu, then moves into stranger grounds where psychological unease mixes with facts. Kafkaesque would be the word applicable to describe Schulz's work (as there even is a story about a man turning insect-like... in this case, the father, not the son) but as researchers surmised, there is no real evidence that Schulz was influenced by Kafka.
What makes Bruno Schulz's prose so heartbreaking is its ceaseless and painful yearning to remember the past; almost every description is a metaphor that is drenched in almost extrasensory feeling. In consequence, every object, every motion, and every emotion remembered by Schulz throbs with a realism that is hot-wired to our subconscious, to our collective and private myths.
If you like reading, you must read Schulz.
Rating: 5
Summary: A master of figurative language
Comment: To me, truly sophisticated writing lies in the writer's skill in using inventive and colorful similes and metaphors to communicate with his reader. The point of figurative language is not to veil the message but to elevate it from the mundane and create fresh new worlds of images and perspectives.
Bruno Schulz not only understood this concept but was one of its greatest practitioners. In his short but incredibly rich "The Street of Crocodiles," summer has a "senile intemperance...[a] lustful and belated spurt of vitality," rays of August heat form a "flaming broom," the moon acquires "milky reflexes, opaline shades, and the glaze of enamel," a cockroach's sudden emergence from a crevice is described as "a crazy black zigzag of lightning," and newly hatched baby birds are "lizards with frail, naked bodies of hunchbacks...[a] dragon brood." Every page of this magnificently odd little book is filled with such gems.
Not quite a novel, but more than just a collection of stories, "The Street of Crocodiles" is a set of loosely connected chapters about Schulz's boyhood in the small Polish town of Drogobych in the earliest years of the twentieth century. His use of figurative language instills his recollections with a dreamlike quality that hovers between reality and fantasy, such as in the chapter entitled "Cinnamon Shops," where the young Schulz's errand home to get money for his family waiting at the theater becomes an exotic journey into the intersection of his mind and the city. In "Nimrod," Schulz writes about the puppy he adopts and its delicate, meticulous process of learning about its environment. But the central episode would have to be "Tailors' Dummies," in which Schulz's eccentric father declaims eloquently on the relationships between God and Man, and Man and Mannequin.
Beautifully translated into English by Celina Wieniewska, this book belongs on every shelf of intelligent bizarre fiction next to the likes of Kafka, Borges, and Thomas Mann.
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Title: Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Writers from the Other Europe) by Bruno Schulz, John Updike ISBN: 0140052720 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: July, 1988 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
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Title: Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz, Danuta Borchardt, Susan Sontag ISBN: 0300082401 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Cosmos and Pornografia: Two Novels by Witold Gombrowicz, Eric Mosbacher, Alastair Hamilton ISBN: 0802151590 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: April, 1994 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, a Biographical Portrait by Jerzy Ficowski, Theodosia S. Robertson, Theodosia Robertson ISBN: 0393051471 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 11 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title:The Brothers Quay Collection: Ten Astonishing Short Films 1984-1993 ASIN: 6305957681 Publisher: Kino Video Pub. Date: 01 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $29.95 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $26.96 |
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