The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories (Penguin Classics) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

If I could cancel one murder and save one life from history, I'd save Bruno Schulz, killed by the Nazis in 1942. If I could save one lost book, I'd save Schulz's 'Messiah'. I can't. At least there is this book of strange treasures, Schulz's collected works. Actually, two books are included here: 'Street of Crocodiles' and 'Sanatorium Under the Sign of The Hourglass'.

The first, Schulz's masterpiece, is only 100 pages long. I could never choose a favorite book, but this is the one I reread most often. Any attempt by me to descibe its contents is a mockery. Reading it is like peering into a strange, dark painting: a mad father, a bewitching sister, a dark corner where something never before seen grows (almost) to life. This book may only take you a day to read, but I promise it will be a illumined and unforgettable day.

'Sanatorium', which I think was written earlier, seems in part a workshop for what 'Crocodiles' would become, but this is appropriate for Schulz: he is the master of life half-created: the life of mannequins, mad relatives, stuffed birds.

My only practical advice is: allow yourself to skim the surreal novella "Spring" if you get bogged down in it the first time you try. Just make sure you don't miss the rest of the stories!

There is nothing else like this book--and this one book is all there is. I envy anyone reading it for the first time.

It's unusual that I'm unprepared or taken by surprise by a book - years of haunting the cramped and poorly lit bookshelves of second hand shops as well as the thousands of dusty, musty blurbs and short introductions I've read over that time cast a broad net. Though I may not be on intimate terms with a particular author, all my research has led me to the assumption that I at least know of his literary cousins or other members of his extended family. This rather boneheaded approach to literature has no doubt led me to pass up certain worthy books under the mistaken impression that I've already absorbed them through some sort of bookshelf osmosis. On the flip side, though, I'm continually searching for relative unknowns and obscure authors, always looking for that feeling of discovery when my efforts are rewarded with someone truly unique.

And so it was with Bruno Schulz and the surreal dreamscape of his 'Street Of Crocodiles'. Previously unknown to me - it was actually this site that recommended him to me - but as I read through the reviews and picked out descriptions such as 'Kafkaesque', and 'Middle European' and others, a picture began to form in my mind. A picture that is, safe to say, completely insufficient to even begin describing what I actually found inside this strange and densely imagined book.

My own lightweight adjectives may add to the misinterpretation. First, I'd like to address the easiest one to correct - though 'The Street of Crocodiles' may adhere to the loosest definition of 'novel' (as some have described it), when I tried to read it as such, I was nearly overwhelmed trying to arrange it into a coherent picture in my mind. Only after a second reading, taking each titled section as an isolated event, was I able to glean a better understanding of (what I believe to be) Shulz's patterns and aims. Both 'The Street of Crocodiles' and 'Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass' are constructed the same way - the characters of each story generally remain the same, as does the setting and the style, except the apparent death of a family member at the conclusion of one story does not preclude his appearance in the next.

In fact, Schulz revisits the demise of his father over and over again, in both collections. Trying to read either 'Crocodiles' or 'Sanatorium' then in the manner of a traditional narrative is mind-bendingly awkward, even allowing for the possible flux of an unreliable narrator.

And except for the notable exception of the story "Spring", from 'Sanatorium', I don't think that the unreliable narrator was Schulz's aim. Though almost every story takes off on a flight of fantasy and unreality, I think he was looking for another way of getting at the truth - truth as seen through the eyes of a child, or the truth that is so demanding at the moment we wake up from a dream, but fades as consciousness returns. In order to immerse us in such conditions, Schulz indulges in surprising, fantastic, sometimes nonsensical imagery - and by this constant barrage of word pictures and metaphor, he jolts me out of my mundane sense of structure I've built up over the years. I've read how some people compare this to the Magic Realism of modern Latin American writers, and I'm probably not qualified to make a comparison, but I will say this - I don't think Schulz's intention was ever to depart from reality. It's only that the reality that he was trying to portray is from a perspective that is so different from the accepted version. If magic happens in Schulz's writing, it's because that's the way his character saw it.

There are times when it all seems too much, as if he's overplayed his hand. One of my biggest hurdles to finishing this collection was how Schulz could elicit such a dramatic sensation in a paragraph that my mind would skip along this tangent trail as I continued to read but not comprehend. That is until I'd come back to my senses and have absolutely no idea what was happening. In a lesser work, I can do this and not really miss much. With Schulz, there is no skimming. It's full immersion or nothing.

This sort of writing isn't for everyone. The reader who prefers his authors to stick to reality will toss this book away quickly. Its structure is not built around a typical story arc - its more as if he's trying to portray an alternate mirror world that needs its own language in order to transport the reader there. But once we arrive at that vantage point, we can then look back through the mirror at our former life and see it anew in all its twisted vain wonder.

Some of the most beautiful writing of the 20th century is contained in the fiction of Bruno Schulz. Although he has not yet received the recognition here in the West that he deserves, his writings are every bit as mystifying and powerful as Kafka's. As others have stated, this one volume contains all of Shulz's stories that are essential reading. This is the one to buy, other collections are always only about half of what you should be getting.

The works of Bruno Schulz are definitely five star, I cannot highly recommend this enough.