The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories

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The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories

by Bruno Schulz, Celina Wieniewska (Translator), Jerzy Ficowski (Introduction), Jonathan Safran Foer (Foreword)

4.21 of 5 stars 4.21 · rating details · 2,682 ratings · 288 reviews

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...more

Paperback, 335 pages

Published March 1st 1992 by Penguin Classics (first published 1934)

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The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories by Bruno Schulz

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz

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1st out of 61 books — 36 voters

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Dec 10, 2007 Nora Dillonovich rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: tout le monde

Shelves: imaginary-bffs-live-in-these-pages, favorites

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...more 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. Andiamo! To the bookstore my bella faccias!(less)

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Apr 29, 2012 Bill Kerwin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: weird-fiction

A strange, uneven book of fiction, but one that is oddly compelling. It is somewhat like magic realism, but more primeval and mythic than the dark fairy tales of Marquez. It is a little like Kafka too, but much more energetic, teeming with life. If Egon Schiele wrote fiction, it might be something like this.

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Jul 12, 2012 Helen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: holocaust

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...more

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Dec 20, 2009 Jacob rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

One of the most haunting, beautiful, amazing, nuanced, and important books that I've ever read. The Street of Crocodiles is profoundly difficult, delicious in its complexity, and while some have compared him favorably to both Proust and Kafka, both comparisons fall flat. Read this book. Buy it. Lend it to out. Buy it again. Lend it out. Please read this book.

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Jul 26, 2010 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

(This review is only for The Street of Crocodiles - the remaining four stories will be added when read.)

Schulz has penned an utterly gorgeous collection of disjointed set pieces here, placed in his native Galician city in a chromagnostic variation of the world, one wherein colour and sensation come alive and stain organic beings with their prismatic hues; where inanimate objects, especially home furnishings like wallpaper and cupboards, doors and closets, have been soaked with the memories of li...more (This review is only for The Street of Crocodiles - the remaining four stories will be added when read.)

Schulz has penned an utterly gorgeous collection of disjointed set pieces here, placed in his native Galician city in a chromagnostic variation of the world, one wherein colour and sensation come alive and stain organic beings with their prismatic hues; where inanimate objects, especially home furnishings like wallpaper and cupboards, doors and closets, have been soaked with the memories of life that once existed both around them and within them: the former human ghosts of rendered actions, the latter vibrations set off by the infinite varieties of life inherent to all matter. The magical flush and saturating the everyday, a world guided by the laws of dream, inchoate and astounding, of papier-mâché trains and alluringly stockinged salesgirls, of wicked desire constrained by impish smiles and coy glances, of family members who blend into the scenery and golem servants who silently direct, whose environ-modeling moods and forms change daily like a routinely shuffled deck of cards; a world wherein an apocalyptic and fetal-positioned anthropomorphic comet strike is avoided by having current fashion outpace the threat and thus render it irrelevant. The actual act of reading Schulz's vivid, visceral creation is one of great pleasure and marvelous mental imagery.

In The Street of Crocodiles is found a surrealistic depiction of Gnostic* revelations, rainbow hues and sepia tones that shade an imagining of the wonders (and agonies) of the multiplicities of form-bearing life, a paean that serves not only as homage to the Demiurge who created us, but to the demiurge locked within our souls, the creative spirit that knows the rituals and words to access matter-moulding energies, but has forgotten these incantations in the machine-tool, automotive world that hatches products in lieu of exiled tribes of chromatic birds, belches forth charcoal smoke into a once nebulae-dancing and mathematically shimmering sky. In a tireless, wide-awake world, how would it be possible to believe your father had transformed himself into a cockroach, or now lived within the eyeless, Buddha-serene condor stuffed and perched atop a living room shelf?

I would have preferred a somewhat more contained novel, a touch more overall cohesiveness to the chapter-length stories conjoined within, as I feel that Schulz might have achieved something truly unique and mind-blowing if he had just tightened a few bolts here and there - though I'll still happily take that which he put to the page in its brief-but-lush glory for us all to enjoy.

* Victoria Nelson persuasively makes the argument that Schulz has crafted his tale within a Hermetic Gnostic framework, as it is all matter - organic and inorganic - that is trapped within the cosmos and alienated from the divine spirit, rather than merely humanity's pneuma. So there.
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Sep 17, 2007 Taka rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: japan_jul07-aug11, other_lit, 1-fiction-you-must-read

"It is an autobiography - or rather, a genealogy - of the spirit ... since it reveals the spirit's pedigree back to those depths where it merges with mythology, here it becomes lost in mythological ravings. I have always felt that the roots of the individual mind, if followed far enough down, would lose themselves in some mythic lair. This is the final depth beyond which one can no longer go."

What a dazzling, charming, funny book. Amazing prose combined with Kafka-esque anomaly and profoundly co...more

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Jul 09, 2007 Mary-Louise rated it 4 of 5 stars

I found this book randomly somewhere. I think someone left it at Joe's Pub when I was working there. It sat on my book shelf for a couple years til a couple months ago. I think I picked it up at an appropriate time, because it gave me a new perspective when my outlook on life was pretty foggy. Any perspective was welcomed, but this one particularly made sense-- or proceeded to make nonsense, but nevertheless got the wheels turning when the crank was rusty.

At first glance, it seems to be a nonsen...more I found this book randomly somewhere. I think someone left it at Joe's Pub when I was working there. It sat on my book shelf for a couple years til a couple months ago. I think I picked it up at an appropriate time, because it gave me a new perspective when my outlook on life was pretty foggy. Any perspective was welcomed, but this one particularly made sense-- or proceeded to make nonsense, but nevertheless got the wheels turning when the crank was rusty.

At first glance, it seems to be a nonsensical story of a boy (perhaps Shultz, himself), his looney father, and the city in which they resided. The introduction preceding Schulz's tale explains the "Schulzian mythology"-- One that teaches us to transgress to a childlike understanding of the subconscious.. As we grow into adults we so easily accept our surroundings, and go about day to day monotony without any upheavel of routine or irregular thought. Shultz questions what is real and what isn't. As children we learn and believe what adults tell us is true-- we are taught to accept a "universal meaning." (What color is the sky? Blue. But what if it is in fact called "Orange" or "Malted" or "Sheila."). Our thoughts begin to meld together into one conformist idea. This book made me begin stretching my mind to believe in new realities. Shultz wrote of his own realities that were shrouded in myths-- a part of town that was fake, a mere myrage of buildings. Most importantly is Schultz's odd protagonist, the father, who would be considered a lunatic by the common man, but is regarded as "the Great Heretic" by Schultz as he goes through many psycho-religious laments. Half the time, the father appeared to be falling apart, but Schultz approached the idea that perhaps the father was just in on a remarkable secret that the rest of the world didn't understand.

Comparison's have been made between Schulz and Franz Kafka. I have not read anything by Kafka, but The Trial is next on my bookshelf to read, so I suppose I will have to let you know.
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Apr 30, 2009 Allycks rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

The Street of Crocodiles gave me wierd dreams. I believe that an intense, honest, and deliberate reading of this book allows the reader to experience a brief form of insanity. At times delicious, at times nauseating. Often both at once. The book is surreal in that it follows its own dreamlike logic-- meandering, waltzing, often curling up for naps-- and the reader is either taken in (keeps dreaming) or repulsed (wakes up.) It's here but nowhere else that I understand the comparisons to Kafka. No...more

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Aug 11, 2007 Sinai added it

Shelves: favorites

the famous story about bruno shultz is that he used to crumble cubes of suger during the winter and when his mother caught him doing this, he would explain his actions by saying "...so at least the flies will survive the winter!" when I heard this story, I had to read his book.
The book is a collection of short stories, mostly centered around the narrator's father, as mentioned in previous reviews. I think any attempt to describe the father's charactor will not be able to do this accuratly so I...more

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Dec 20, 2007 Audrey rated it 4 of 5 stars

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...more

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Oct 16, 2012 Tanuj Solanki rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir, owned, poland, jewish

The writing is an 'event in language'. Still.

Some roots of Gunter Grass and Gabriel Garcia Marquez - the magical metaphor as poetry in sentence - may be found here.

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Mar 18, 2013 Beth rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books, around-world-13, 6-books-6-countries-6-continents, jewish

He dressed with care, but without haste, with long pauses between the separate manipulations.

The rooms, empty and neglected, did not approve of him, the furniture and the walls watched him in silent criticism.

He felt, entering the stillness, like an intruder in an underwater kingdom with a different, separate notion of time.

Opening his own drawers, he felt like a thief and could not help moving on tiptoe, afraid to arouse noisy and excessive echoes that waited irritably for the chance to explod...more He dressed with care, but without haste, with long pauses between the separate manipulations.

The rooms, empty and neglected, did not approve of him, the furniture and the walls watched him in silent criticism.

He felt, entering the stillness, like an intruder in an underwater kingdom with a different, separate notion of time.

Opening his own drawers, he felt like a thief and could not help moving on tiptoe, afraid to arouse noisy and excessive echoes that waited irritably for the chance to explode on the slightest provocation.

And finally, when after sneaking from dresser to closet, he had found piece by piece all he needed and had finished his dressing among the furniture which bore with him in silence, and was ready at last, he stood, hat in hand, feeling rather embarrassed that even at the last moment he could not find a word which would dispel that hostile silence; he walked toward the door slowly, resignedly, hanging his head, while someone else, someone forever turning his back, walked at the same pace in the opposite direction into the depths of the mirror, through the row of empty rooms which did not exist.

I could have almost picked randomly in The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories for a passage to exemplify Bruno Schulz's writing. It is consistently evocative, generating images that are alternately lush, fragrant, eerie, haunting. This book is not exactly a novel, but not exactly a set of stories. There isn't a plot really in either the entire book or the stories themselves, and yet they form a compelling collection. They are a like a display of Faberge eggs that can be examined for their exquisite detail and marveled at. Only the eggs would not create a sense of a haunting whole and would not contain within them social commentary. I'm deeply grateful that this book ended up on the 1001 list. It was also mentioned in some other book I just read (wish I could remember which it was now), and I immediately looked it up. I would not have wanted to miss it. Sadly, there is little else to read by Schulz, as he was shot dead walking through an Aryan part of his small Polish town during WWII when still a young man. I will definitely be tracking down whatever else IS available in English though.(less)

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Nov 04, 2010 Nate D rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Those who walk with fascination through labyrinths of memory

Recommended to Nate D by: Wojciech Has

Shelves: poland, stories, favorites, interwar-maladies

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,...more 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.(less)

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Feb 16, 2010 Marie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book turned my notions of writing and reading on its head. Such beautiful writing, and fantastic- where a perfectly described, familiar feeling scene suddenly becomes surreal, where time and objects can transform without limit. Don't expect plot driven writing, but a full exploration of the bounds of written words and equally full pocket of rewards for patient readers. A good description of Schulz' writing style is contained within his writing in 'The Republic of Dreams'. He describes a gro...more

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Jun 06, 2011 Geoff rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

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:

http://www.brunoschulzart.org/

...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...more

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Dec 13, 2008 Rick rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Published in Poland in 1934, this is one of two books of fiction published in the lifetime of Bruno Schulz, who was murdered, along with one hundred and fifty others, in a Gestapo killing spree on November 19, 1942. The stories here are autobiographical with fantasy and dreams intruding on the real. A room becomes an aviary for exotic birds—condors and cranes, peacocks and pelicans. Birds too big for a house and too tropical for Poland swoop through an attic room. Dead characters appear. Streets...more

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Apr 20, 2013 Chris Nevin rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Street of Crocodiles is an outstanding collection of stories. It is an autobiography told through the lens of nostalgia and childlike fantasy, and follows Shulz’s life through his childhood in a small, sleepy town in Poland where nothing much ever happens. This may seem like a fairly uninteresting setting for a book, but Shulz manages to inject his own air of poetry and magic into every sentence. When he describes a visit to his aunt and uncle, he tells of how, when he enters their living ro...more The Street of Crocodiles is an outstanding collection of stories. It is an autobiography told through the lens of nostalgia and childlike fantasy, and follows Shulz’s life through his childhood in a small, sleepy town in Poland where nothing much ever happens. This may seem like a fairly uninteresting setting for a book, but Shulz manages to inject his own air of poetry and magic into every sentence. When he describes a visit to his aunt and uncle, he tells of how, when he enters their living room, they are sat “as if in the shadow of their own destiny”. He goes on to describe his promiscuous aunt as having flesh “floating as it were outside the boundaries of her person, held only loosely in the fetters of individual form , and, despite those fetters, ready to multiply, to scatter, branch out, and divide into a family.” You can see from these two short excerpts the effortless way in which Shulz manages to transform reality, through his own unique perspective, into something wonderful and ethereal.

Of all the characters that Shulz portrays, his father is by far my favourite. While Bruno is still quite young, his father begins to lose his mind - locking himself in his room, and waging titanic war against his God. Shulz recreates scenes in which his father shakes with the “divine anger of saintly men” roaring in the language of thunder as the terrible Demiurge “press[es] his enormous face against the upper panes of the window”. Shulz explains how they often rent rooms of their house out, and how, sometimes, a tenant would leave without telling them and they would wander into a long forgotten room to find it empty. His father would disappear, sometimes for weeks on end into these mysterious recesses of the house, only to re-emerge weeks later, weak and hungry. While his father still has a shred of his former sanity, he is obviously terrified and angry at this slide in his own mental capacity, but once he has crossed this threshold, Shulz paints him as quiet and meek and, not to take away from his struggle, lovably eccentric. He imports dozens of rare bird eggs and hatches them, keeping the bright and colourful flock in the attic. Shulz tells of how his father begins to lose himself in the life of the birds, coming down to dinner and attempting to peck at his food. When their housekeeper eventually has to free the birds due to the enormous amounts of faeces covering the attic, he is panicked and tries to fly with them out of the window.

Bruno Shulz never completely loses himself to fantasy in this book, he merely drapes it over his life and surroundings to give everything a brighter appearance. This book isn't Alice in Wonderland or Pan’s Labyrinth. It is always easy to forget that to an author from the past, he is not describing something, with the rose tinted spectacles of nostalgia, from a long lost era - this was his “present day” in all its mundanity and normalcy. I think it would be a great gift to be able to see the world in such a warm hearted and giving way as Shulz writes about his.

Bruno Shulz is, himself, a fascinating character. He was born in 1892 and taught art in a secondary school in Poland writing constantly for his own amusement, but it wasn't until he was forty years of age, when he was introduced to a distinguished novelist, that he was able to see his works published. Less than ten years later he was confined to a ghetto as a Jewish citizen and in 1942 he was shot dead in the streets. He published a sum total of three works and was reportedly working on a fourth, though, sadly for the world of the literarily insatiable, this has been lost.

The Street of Crocodiles is quite simply poetry in prose. I have never been one who was able to remember quotes from great writers, but I truly wish I was, because if so, I would try and memorise most of the sentences in this book. Besides for obvious reasons, it is a tragedy that this lyrical master was snatched away before he was able to produce any further work.

As an additional note, Jonathan Safran Foer lists Street of Crocodiles as his favourite book and has used it to create his own work "Tree of Codes." Using a die-cut on every page he has extracted the story of one person’s “last day on earth.” I have not read this book myself, but I have to say that with Street of Crocodiles as its foundation, I am sorely tempted.(less)

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Apr 06, 2013 Victoria Haf rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: libros-que-amo

Por fin acabé este libro! Llevo dos años intentándolo... Es muy raro, parece hecho de sueños, y los capítulos no siempre tienen continuidad, son como pequeñas historias, algunos mejores que los otros pero con excelentes descripciones, amo como Bruno Schulz describe la luz, debió ser fotógrafo además de escritor y dibujante:

“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

...more

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Mar 18, 2013 Jan rated it 5 of 5 stars

I came to this book through Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, which is an excised novel of Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles. Foer explains at the end of his book that he had always wanted to create an excised book but couldn't decide which book to use-- a dictionary, an encyclopedia, a phone book. But all these choices seemed to be more about the process and less connected to content and meaning. It was then he thought of excising his favorite book, his favorite author, The Street of Crocod...more I came to this book through Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, which is an excised novel of Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles. Foer explains at the end of his book that he had always wanted to create an excised book but couldn't decide which book to use-- a dictionary, an encyclopedia, a phone book. But all these choices seemed to be more about the process and less connected to content and meaning. It was then he thought of excising his favorite book, his favorite author, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. Born in 1892 in Drohobycz, Poland, Schulz was a quiet, unassuming man who taught art in the local high school. He was a loner. In his free time, he wrote and made drawings.

In 1941, the Germans occupied his city and he was forced to live in the ghetto in Droghobycz. Schulz had given his manuscripts to some friends for safekeeping including a novel, The Messiah. These manuscripts have never been found. The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, two slim collections of his short stories, are the only existing works by Schulz, both published before the German invasion. Schulz was temporarily protected by a German officer, Felix Landau, who liked his drawings and had him paint a mural in the nursery of his home for his child (Landau also left an extensive diary.). On November 19, 1942, with a special pass, Schulz was walking in the Aryan district to buy bread and was shot and killed by Karl Gunther, a rival of Landau's. Landau had earlier that day killed Gunther's "favored" Jew. Gunther supposedly said to Landau, "You killed my Jew, I killed yours."

It is hard to throw this knowledge off as one reads the urgent, lush prose, the magical, hypnotic, sensually observed words of Schulz. This is fiction that is more like surrealistic poetry conjured out of the everyday, a kind of alternative reality- certainly an altered state of consciousness. His stories in The Street of Crocodiles are based on Schulz's memories of his childhood, but overblown, reconfigured, transmogrified. The main character is his father, whose mental stability is questioned, normalized, and celebrated in a hallucinatory way. Especially powerful is the story "Birds" describing his father's hatching of exotic birds in the attic. But it is the city itself, Drohobycz, which is the main character in these vignettes and helps to tie these stories together into a kind of novella rather than disparate tales. The Street of Crocodiles needs to be savored for its inventiveness, evocativeness, and creativity, but also for its absolutely gorgeous prose. The poignancy of what was lost is painfully palpable.

Foer stated that by excising this gem of prose he was in part experiencing and expressing what was lost by Schulz's death and the death of innumerable others in the Holocaust. He continued that The Street of Crocodiles seemed to him to be a distillation of some greater work and his excised version yet another distillation. Foer said, "The sentences feel too unlikely to have been created on purpose. The language is too heightened, the images too magical and precarious, the yearnings too dire, the sense of loss too palpable--everything is too simultaneously comic and tragic."

The Street of Crocodiles is an experience, a mythic experience, a transcendent, hypnagogic experience. I can't believe that it took me this long to learn about Bruno Schulz.(less)

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Mar 07, 2013 Anna rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: everybody who love the written word

Shelves: absolutely-enchanting, actually-surprised-how-good-it-was, between-realism-and-fantasy, book-with-the-atmosphere, i-don-t-really-catch-it-yet-love-it

If Bruno Schulz is not a genial writer, then there is none nor there have ever been one. His works capture the indescribable. His stories may be short but they do not lack in complexity. They are so bizarre yet so mesmerizing. Reading them is a constant swing between realism and fantasy, between poetry and prose, a magnificent onirist dream. His vision of Drohobych is thrilling, magical, a little eerie. It makes me willing to visit the city and get lost in there, and at the same time makes me af...more

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Dec 25, 2012 [P] rated it 4 of 5 stars

Roll up, roll up, ladies and gentlemen, because we are about to play simile bingo! Your card is shown below, and all you have to do is join the object printed on one of the balls drawn from my bag to another random object printed on another ball to create a poetic sentence. So eyes down as we are about to draw.

...is like a...
...is like a...
...is like the...
...is like a...
...is like a...
...is like the...
...is like one...

First ball: the tiger!

Interesting! So, what is a tiger like, ladies and gent...more

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Aug 19, 2012 Tim Pendry rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: black-comedy, consciousness, dark-fantasy, cultural-studies, esoteric, five-star, horror, modern-european, literature-general, twentieth-century

Here are two remarkable collections of stories from the interwar period by the increasingly admired if politically appropriated Bruno Schulz, a Galician Jew murdered by a Nazi during the occupation.

The introduction is worth reading and it stops me having to deal here with the issue of cultural appropriation for political purposes - the sad fate of many dead East Europeans.

Poland between the wars had a rich literary and cultural life which always was part of the European mainstream.

Schulz himself...more

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Jul 25, 2012 Jeff L rated it 4 of 5 stars

If Schulz were writing today, his style might have been compared to the magic realists. His prose veers from the patently prosaic to fantastical. But Schulz was writing before the second world war. One of the writers he himself admired was Kafka and recalling that point you remember that Kafka had a similar juxtaposition of realist and dream-like qualities. Schulz in fact has a Metamorphosis-like story in this book.

The book itself is a collection of vignettes drawn from Schluz's family life and...more

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Dec 22, 2011 Gareth Lewis rated it 4 of 5 stars

Irritatingly marvelous descriptions of absolutely everything, and some of the most surreal domestic parables you'll ever encounter. He was a complete one-off, and this book is pretty much all there is to his name (a lost masterpiece is rumoured to be...well...lost). I'd take Schultz over Borges any day.

“Figures in a waxwork museum,” he began, “even fairground parodies of dummies, must not be treated lightly. Matter never makes jokes: it is always full of the tragically serious. Who dares to thin...more

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Feb 09, 2011 Merry rated it 5 of 5 stars

I ordered this book along with Tree of Codes by Foer. Obviously I'm a big fan of Jonathan Foer. The reviews said that his latest book (Tree of Codes) was inspired by Street of Crocodiles.

Street of Crocodiles is a very haunting book, and the author's life story is even more bizarre. He was an artist and writer living in a Poland in 1941 under the occupation of the Nazis. He was kept alive because a particular officer liked his art. However, he was murdered by another officer when he was out one...more

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Nov 02, 2010 Aaron rated it 4 of 5 stars

After I pressed a friend of mine, he expressed to me that this was one of his favorite books. I'd been going on a rant about the virtues of Ulysses, particularly how it aestheticizes the banal, and he immediately mentioned this book.

Kafkaesque in a way that Kafka should have been, this selection of short stories - actually more like a series of portraits - reveal an ordinary world where not much happens, but yet, paradoxically, everything happens. Flanked by the tragicomic figure of the father,...more

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Jul 12, 2009 UConnCo-op rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Whenever anyone asked me what I was reading last week, and the unfortunately somewhat unfamiliar title "Street of Crocodiles" came up, I tried to give a succinct explanation: Bruno Schulz is sort of like a more sentimental, gentler Kafka with a dash of Sacher-Masoch thrown in. That's probably too facile of a blurb, but the comparisons between Kafka and Schulz are unavoidable--the father-figure in Schulz, bedridden, possessed by strange fixations, occasionally inflamed by the apocalyptic passions...more

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Jan 06, 2013 Andrew rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, 20th-century, continental

The jacket claimed that Schulz's writing is as good as Kafka's or Proust's and occasionally better. If I were to list my 5 favorite authors, there's a good chance both those authors would be on there, so this is high praise indeed. I don't think he managed it. But in the best of these stories, he came close. Especially as it got away from focusing on his father. I liked the character of the father, around whom most of the stories centered as he got sicker and went crazier. But I felt those stori...more

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Mar 26, 2012 Tripp added it

Shelves: first-person, past-tense, omniscient

Is it a short story collection or a novel? I now tend to think of it as a novel, though that's a tenuous decision, at best. With Schulz, forget pigeon-holing. He thought of the book as an autobiographical narrative, the unnamed narrator a Schulz stand-in mythologizing the small town of Drogobych--then in southeastern Poland, now in Ukraine by the magic of partition--via the most marvelous language ever caught between the pages of a book. With this complex, Latinate, super-heated language--yes, h...more

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Oct 09, 2012 Jim Elkins rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: polish

Some passages in "The Street of Crocodiles" are as intensely and sharply described as anything in fiction. Here is a sentence introducing the idea that some years that go on too long, and sprout extra months:[return][return]"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 crablike weed days, sterile and stupid, added as an afterthought; stunted, empty, useless days--white days, perman...more Some passages in "The Street of Crocodiles" are as intensely and sharply described as anything in fiction. Here is a sentence introducing the idea that some years that go on too long, and sprout extra months:[return][return]"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 crablike weed days, sterile and stupid, added as an afterthought; stunted, empty, useless days--white days, permanently astonished and quite unnecessary." (p. 83).[return][return]By comparison so much fiction is unfocused: even passages of Nabokov can seem slightly dulled by comparison: Nabokov's sense of what sharp writing can be can appear as a kind of dried-up, academic, precious version of Schulz. Writers like Banville or Handke (who owes a lot to Schulz) can seem positively soft. Rilke is a closer comparison, and so is Trakl. And there are also passages that Walter Benjamin would have envied, like this one describing a newly modernized society:[return][return]"Man was entering under false pretenses the sphere of incredible facilities, acquired too cheaply, below cost price, almost for nothing, and the disproportion between outlay and gain, the obvious fraud on nature, the excessive payment for a trick of genius, had to be offset by self-parody." (p. 99)[return][return]A good half of the books I've read this year aren't even _written_ in the sense I mean here: they're just sentences, with no use of language beyond the barely denotative and informational. Franzen's "Freedom" is like that, and most of �nard's "Zone." Schulz is the diametric opposite: no sentence is permitted in his fiction unless it squeezes language until it nearly chokes. [return][return]This is one of the things Jonathan Safran Foer likes about Schulz. In his introduction, he he says he thought "The Street of Crocodiles" was a great book, but that he still didn't like it:[return][return]"The language was too heightened, the images too magical and precarious, the yearnings too dire, the sense of loss too palpable--everything was comedy or tragedy." (p. ix)[return][return]Some of Schulz is surrealism, as when a man is reduced to the rubber tubes used for enemas (!), but most of it is rhapsodic, ecstatic, and visionary -- "magical" in Foer's term. And that is exactly the limitation of the work: it is deeply romantic in an old-fashioned sense, desperate ("dire" is Foer's word) for revelation and salvation, obsessed with ending, decay, corruption, "loss," and their fragile opposites: brilliant flashes of light, comets, strange meaningful patterns, hidden arcane knowledge. "The Street of Crocodiles" is not a novel or a collection of stories, but not for the usual formal reason (that is, not because the sections fail to cohere, as in a novel, or remain distinct from one another, as in a collection of short stories or prose poems), but because Schulz's obsessive scenes keep recurring. Form isn't the point: what matters is getting the transient revelation right. There are inadvertent repetitions, and repetitions he has recognized turned into elaborations. Both sorts are signs that what matters is not the story but the mould, the fever, the impending insanity or petrifaction, the pathos of the overlooked and ruined hallway smeared with grime and spotted with stains. It is a very nineteenth-century vision, made more intense by its twentieth-century setting. In that sense it is typical central European romantic fiction. What it lacks and "desperately" needs is the coldness of Kafka.(less)

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About Bruno Schulz

Bruno Schulz was the son of cloth merchant Jakub Schulz and Henrietta, née Kuhmerker. At a very early age, he developed an interest in the arts. He studied at a gymnasium in Drohobycz from 1902 to 1910, and proceeded to study architecture at Lwów University. In 1917 he briefly studied architecture in Vienna. After World War I, the region of Galicia which included Drohobycz became a Polish territor...more Bruno Schulz was the son of cloth merchant Jakub Schulz and Henrietta, née Kuhmerker. At a very early age, he developed an interest in the arts. He studied at a gymnasium in Drohobycz from 1902 to 1910, and proceeded to study architecture at Lwów University. In 1917 he briefly studied architecture in Vienna. After World War I, the region of Galicia which included Drohobycz became a Polish territory. In the postwar period, Schulz came to teach drawing in a Polish gymnasium, from 1924 to 1941. His employment kept him in his hometown, although he disliked his profession as a schoolteacher, apparently maintaining it only because it was his sole means of income.

The author nurtured his extraordinary imagination in a swarm of identities and nationalities: a Jew who thought and wrote in Polish, was fluent in German, and immersed in Jewish culture though unfamiliar with the Yiddish language. Yet there was nothing cosmopolitan about him; his genius fed in solitude on specific local and ethnic sources. He preferred not to leave his provincial hometown, which over the course of his life belonged to four countries. His adult life was often perceived by outsiders as that of a hermit: uneventful and enclosed.

Schulz seems to have become a writer by chance, as he was discouraged by influential colleagues from publishing his first short stories. His aspirations were refreshed, however, when several letters that he wrote to a friend, in which he gave highly original accounts of his solitary life and the details of the lives of his fellow citizens, were brought to the attention of the novelist Zofia Nałkowska. She encouraged Schulz to have them published as short fiction, and The Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy Cynamonowe) was published in 1934; in English-speaking countries, it is most often referred to as The Street of Crocodiles, a title derived from one of the chapters. This novel-memoir was followed three years later by Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą). The original publications were fully illustrated by Schulz himself; in later editions of his works, however, these illustrations are often left out or are poorly reproduced. He also helped his fiancée translate Franz Kafka's The Trial into Polish, in 1936. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award.

The outbreak of World War II in 1939 caught Schulz living in Drohobycz, which was occupied by the Soviet Union. There are reports that he worked on a novel called The Messiah, but no trace of this manuscript survived his death. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, as a Jew he was forced to live in the ghetto of Drohobycz, but he was temporarily protected by Felix Landau, a Gestapo officer who admired his drawings. During the last weeks of his life, Schulz painted a mural in Landau's home in Drohobycz, in the style with which he is identified. Shortly after completing the work, Schulz was bringing home a loaf of bread when he was shot and killed by a German officer, Karl Günther, a rival of his protector (Landau had killed Günther's "personal Jew," a dentist). Over the years his mural was covered with paint and forgotten.(less)

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Books by Bruno Schulz

Sklepy cynamonowe; Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

Le botteghe color cannella: tutti i racconti, gli inediti e i disegni

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“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.” — 14 people liked it

“...."the sound of a barrel organ rising from the deepest golden vein of the 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.” — 14 people liked it

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