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Aristotle considered metaphor making the paramount skill for a writer to cultivate. My collection of Schulz's works -- 26 short stories -- exhibits an approach to style comparable to Kafka. Of the two, however, I think Schulz the more optimistic. Also, Kafka is not nearly so fond of metaphors as Schulz. Such a line by Schulz as 'she unloaded sides of meat with their keyboard of ribs swollen with energy and strength' indicates a mind with a knack for seeing similarity in differences, the hallmark of a metaphorist. If this sip of Bruno Schulz appeals to a reader, a vat more awaits his palate in this book.
There are writers who create fiction largely unrelated to their lives. Barbara Cortland wrote romances set in previous centuries. Louis D'amour set his stories in the old west. Agatha Christy was a queen of murder mysteries though she never got even a traffic ticket. Bruno Schulz is not in this category. He belongs to those writers who write close to home. Kafka and Joyce are likewise members of this illustrious and fascinating group. They spin the dross of their lives into golden prose. I can not be so audacious as to declare their domain the best in the literature's empire, but in my opinion a visit to them is well worth taking.
The engaging introduction to The Street of Crocodiles provides a reader with the salient facts of this little known artist. Bruno Schulz's genius and life ended in the Nazi oppression of European Jewry. Nothing can be done to erase that dark icy period. Some atonement is possible, however, in the recovery of this author's works and their ava! ilability on the internet.
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
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.
His input continued to illuminate not only the character of his uncle but also the world in which he wrote and lived. There is often a lyrical, often somewhat pastoral quality to much of Bruno Schulz's writing. The external reality so closely associated with the subjects and settings of his work are widely regarded as bleak and burnished. The world he represents in his stories is not necessarily in keeping with the images often associated with Poland during his lifetime, he was a writer influenced by the imagination...
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