Bruno Schulz spent most of his life as a school art teacher in the Galician town of Drohobycz (now Drohobych, Ukraine). He published two collections of Polish short stories in the 1930s, as well as a few uncollected stories, all included in this Penguin Classics collection, together with many of Schulz's own illustrations. His other unpublished manuscripts, said to have included a novel, were all lost during the war, but that small body of published work has been enough to make him an influential writer. Schulz was murdered by a Nazi officer in 1942.

I picked this up rather expecting quaint little stories of small-town life in Mitteleuropa, but it turns out to be something quite different. Schulz was clearly heavily influenced by (at least) Kafka, Thomas Mann, and the surrealists, and his stories, although they usually start out from the bourgeois domesticity of the Schulz family in Drohobycz ca. 1900, invariably branch away from realism into dream worlds in which the narrator's draper father becomes a heroic figure locked in a quixotic struggle against the constraints of sanity (on occasion turning into an arthropod or being sent to a Magic-Mountainish sanatorium), the maidservant Adela turns into every kind of female archetype, the narrator seems to switch constantly between adult, adolescent and small child (in one story he is an old-age pensioner who enrols in primary school), and the town itself shifts shape in all sorts of unpredictable ways.

This all comes with inventive (over-)rich visual descriptions, often seeming to borrow techniques from the cinema of the times, and all kinds of dreamlike category-changes, when seasons or places or trains develop personalities, waxwork figures and tailor's dummies come to life, and members of the Hapsburg family turn up uninvited.

Very strange and fascinating, definitely something I'm going to have to re-read soon.

But, once again, this makes me sad about what has happened to Penguin Classics. They still have the smart black cover designs I remember from forty years ago, but the insides have turned into a mush of smudgy ink crookedly printed on translucent paper that is creased before you even get the book home from the shop. What are they thinking? ( )

This book is either a novel, or more likely, a collection of semi-interconnected stories, some more connected than others. Joseph, his father, and sister Adela are recurring characters. In general people react with seemingly normal responses to things only to wander into surreal Shandean digressions which may or may not take the reader eventually back to "reality." Most of the action is driven by what appears to be the characters' subconscious, for lack of any other better motivation. This may be reading too much into it and the purely surreal may be what the author is primarily striving for. Many bizarre transformations also abound.

At times I felt like I was a prisoner in a cross between a Luis Bunuel film and Eraserhead, not necessarily a bad thing. Images are striking and vivid and despite what I've said, cogent metaphors do pepper the text. I found this, despite the bizarre nature of the book, a rather easy read. Don't let your mind wander because the story doesn't always follow a linear path and you may find you don't know what happened a few pages ago and won't be able to reconstruct it just from the context.

There is also an excellent screen adaptation of The Street of Crocodiles by the Quay Brothers. ( )

This is a book I picked up at the description on the back. I knew nothing of the author, topics, etc. And I'm glad I did. I wasn't expecting much, but this is a book that sits on the edge of magical realism, surrealism, and life. The original language is Polish, and I can't compare the translation, but this English version, translated by Celina Wieniewska, is magical. Descriptions of light is incredible, and it manages to capture the magicalness of changes of seasons, weather, time. As always in a collection, some stories are better than others.

The introduction in this Penguin Classic edition adds to the story. Schulz led a fairly quiet life, that was cut short by a Nazi Officer.

I highly recommend this volume of stories. ( )

It’s not often I find myself agreeing with Jonathan Safran Foer (it’s not often I find anything he says interesting enough to take issue with either way, but that’s besides the point), but when he says he loved this book but didn’t like it, I kind of know what he means.

Read the full review on The Lectern ( )

If Bruno Schulz were a painter he would be an impressionist. His ability to create evocative imagery should take a back seat to no one. And in this sense, he is a writer's writer. Anyone who enjoys digging deep into the writer's style, the way he frames his sentences and paragraphs, how he structures his stories, will find a fertile field for exploration in his work.

Schulz is a one-of-a-kind writer, or at least he was when his work was first published in the 1930s. The writer he most resembles, according to Italo Calvino — and I would agree — is Felisberto Hernandez, the rather obscure Uruguayan author of Piano Stories and much more that is not available in English translation. I actually prefer Hernandez because his stories — although not devoid of flights of fancy — have more of a foundation in reality and certainly more variety. Francine Prose has characterized them best:

To read writers like Bruno Schulz and Felisberto Hernandez is less like hearing about a dream than like actually having one: familiar notions of causality no longer apply, yet the sequence of events seems correct, as it does in dreams even when people and objects behave in unlikely ways.

Schulz seems to revel in people "behaving in unlikely ways." Almost all of his stories begin by setting a scene and skillfully drawing the reader in. But at the same time almost all of these same stories in the end have characters acting so strangely, the writing becomes so ambiguous, that one is never quite sure what has happened. The ambiguity actually becomes burdensome after a while when story after story has the same pattern: evocative scene, quirky characters, bizarre denouements. It is not the ambiguity per se that becomes irritating, it is that it almost becomes a shtick — or even a tic!

The volume at hand contains all of Schulz's writings: The Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, and three other stories. The first two contain thirteen stories each, all related, but when all of the twenty-nine stories are read in succession they all relate to the same familiar milieu, and the reader comes away with impressions and nothing more. I can really tell you nothing meaningful about what transpires here other than repeated descents into madness.

Bottom line, I admire very much the poetic quality of Schulz's style, but the predictable sameness of these stories that start out promisingly enough but devolve into a fog at best or madness at worst is in the end rather disappointing. There isn't much of a takeaway here. ( )