The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories by Bruno Schulz
The untimely death of Bruno Schulz at the hands of a Nazi is regarded as one of the major losses to modern literature. His work received little praise during his lifetime, but when knowledge of his extraordinary abilities spread, he gradually gained a global readership. His whole novels, three short stories, and his last surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, are included in one anthology. This book, lavishly illustrated with Schulz’s original drawings, displays the singular surrealist vision of one of the most talented and significant writers of the twentieth century.
The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories by Bruno Schulz
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A truly great finding. If you wanted a mental map of the world of this amazing author, you might consider its roots in Andersen’s fairy tales, Frankenstein fantasies, Jung’s archetypes, Freud’s dreams and nightmares, de Sade’s philosophical endeavours, Sacher-dominant Masoch’s women, Kafka’s strange worlds, Anton Reichenow’s ornithological guidebooks with their engravings, Gombrowicz’s strange worlds, and Salman Rushdie or Danilo Kis both contain shoots. He could be considered the forerunner of magical realism, but it is not his fault. The theatre of the ridiculous is another option.
The man was working and leading an unnaturally curtailed life in a Polish backwater at the nexus of the interwar avant-garde. Schulz was a graphic artist and a writer in the Polish language who lived and died in a Jewish community that had been Austrian at the time of his birth, Polish at the time of his death, Soviet at the time of his death, Nazi at the time of his death, and Ukrainian at the time of his death.
He was shot by a Nazi officer who met him outside the Jewish Ghetto, which he was not allowed to leave, and his murder was ridiculous and terribly period-appropriate.
Given that it has named small chapters that serve as storylines, the book might legitimately also be referred to as a novel. The narrator is a young child whose mother has a store and whose father stays at home, where he is ill and dying while also acting strangely. But there is no chronological order to the stories. In one story, the father has passed away, whereas, in the one after, he is back in the shop. Or perhaps he hasn’t actually passed on but rather reanimated as a cockroach. Father is a secondary would-be demiurge who is also a philosopher and heresiarch.
These are fantastic short stories with realistic undertones and stunning fantastical elements wrapped up in an adolescent perspective. The fascism of the right and left was short to engulf mid-European republics, and this book is a startlingly honest and wonderful picture of the period and beliefs surrounding it.
