- Hardcover: 159 pages
- Publisher: Walker and Company; First US Edition edition (1963)
- Language English
- ASIN: B0007E5NM4
- Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,740,696 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
| ||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
36 of 49 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I became acquainted with Bruno Schulz by way of a literary critic who mentioned John Updike's admiration of the Polish writer's gift for metaphors. Now Updike is no slouch himself at composing breath taking metaphors. The admiration of an American master for Schulz piqued my curiosity. I found and read Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass which led to my acquiring The Street of Crocodiles from Amazon Books.
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.
5 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
There are some books that you just have to have read if you want to perceive the essence of the twentieth-century. This, along with Sartre, Kafka, Greene et al, is one such book. Get it....Read it.....Love it.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
18 reviews
99 of 103 people found the following review helpful
Remarkable
9 Jan 2004
Format:Paperback
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
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
38 of 41 people found the following review helpful
Amazing.
7 Jan 2003
Format:Paperback
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.
22 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Street of the Dove
25 Jan 2001
Format:Paperback
In this diminutive collection of stories, Schulz paints a complex portrait of the landscape in his childhood in Poland. The stories evolve more from the physical landscape than that of the characters, giving an intense life to inanimate objects. A sense of hidden madness, and threads of unspoken desires and fears permeate the book. Schulz writes of his father's creeping insanity, the strange landscape of his small shop, and the forboding accompanying the end of the world with the approach of a comet. While Schulz's imagery and simile get a little repetitive, the atmosphere of living objects and mysterious confluence of life is compelling and hypnotic.
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...
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
