(Original Review, 1981-05-30)




Why do I read? To learn, to experience worlds, emotions, interactions that I don't experience in my reality, to think, to be, to become.

If not for Huxley - recommended by an English teacher at school - I'd have remained a working class racist, sexist homophobe, would never have smoked haxixe, gone on to study philosophy, met my children's mother, have had wonderful kids or stepped out of a culture of impoverished imagination.
I might have been 'a happy pig' rather than an "unhappy philosopher," (to paraphrase Plato) it's true, but it's been a richer life for it.

 

 

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

Bruno Schulz had an imagination like no one else. His metaphors, similes, and personifications whirl the reader through a cosmos as vivid and surreal as Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” His characters prophesy like the enigmatic beings that inhabit the pages of William Blake. At once fiction and nonfiction, prose and poetry, memory and dream, The Street of Crocodiles defies categorization.

Schulz is sometimes compared to Kafka, but he should not be. He is not Kafkaesque. The world of Kafka is a nightmare world ~ a nightmare from which one cannot awaken. The world of Schulz is the real world touched by the fantastic, the real world as perceived in a dream. Nor is this magical realism, for elements of fantasy do not truly invade the real world. It is only the narrator’s perceptions which import the fantastic or the grotesque into the real.

The distortions of reality—of time and space—are distortions imposed by the mind of the observer. And the observer is the mythopoeic visionary Bruno Schulz, a man whose dream world is superimposed upon the real one, a man who is at home with the visions of prophets and madmen, a man who never quite lost the childhood ability to see behind the curtain of the mundane, to glimpse the cosmic wonders through which the mass of men and women sleepwalk. Schulz is like one who awakens in a dream.

The following passages highlight three dream elements in The Street of Crocodiles. First, there is spatial distortion.

“I stepped into a winter night bright from the illuminations of the sky. It was one of those clear nights when the starry firmament is so wide and spreads so far that it seems to be divided and broken up into a mass of separate skies, sufficient for a whole month of winter nights and providing silver and painted globes to cover all the nightly phenomena, adventures, occurrences and carnivals.

It is exceedingly thoughtless to send a young boy out on an urgent and important errand into a night like that because in its semiobscurity the streets multiply, becoming confused and interchanged. There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are doubles, make-believe streets. One’s imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which the streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night...” (87-88).

Second, there is temporal distortion.

“Everyone knows that in a run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which—like a sixth, smallest toe—grow a thirteenth freak month.

We use the word ‘freak’ deliberately, because the thirteenth month only rarely reaches maturity, and like a child conceived late in its mother’s life, it lags behind in growth; it is a hunchback month, a half-witted shoot, more tentative than real.

What is at fault is the senile intemperance of the summer, its lustful and belated spurt of vitality. It sometimes happens that August has passed, and yet the old thick trunk of summer continues by force of habit to produce and from its moldered wood grows those crab-days, weed-days, sterile and stupid, added as an afterthought; stunted, empty, useless days –white days, permanently astonished and quite unnecessary. They sprout, irregular and uneven, formless and joined like the fingers of a monster's hand, stumps folded into a fist.

There are people who liken these days to an apocrypha, put secretly between the chapters of the great book of the year; to palimpsests, covertly included between its pages; to those white, unprinted sheets on which eyes, replete with reading and the remembered shapes of words, can imagine colors and pictures, which gradually become paler and paler from the blankness of the pages, or can rest on their neutrality before continuing the quest for new adventures in new chapters” (125-126).

And last, there is the uncanny ~ the revelation of an occult world that coexists with the real world, a world hidden from all but the few whose peculiar nature allows them to discover it.

“... at that late hour the strange and most attractive shops were sometimes open, the shops which on ordinary days one tended to overlook. I used to call them cinnamon shops because of the dark paneling of their walls.

These truly noble shops, open late at night, have always been the objects of my ardent interest. Dimly lit, their dark and solemn interiors were redolent of the smell of paint, varnish and incense; of the aroma of distant countries and rare commodities. You could find in them Bengal lights, magic boxes, the stamps of long-forgotten countries, Chinese decals, indigo, calaphony from Malabar, the eggs of exotic insects, parrots, toucans, live salamanders and basilisks, mandrake roots, mechanical toys from Nuremberg, homunculi in jars, microscopes, binoculars and most especially strange and rare books, old folio volumes full of astonishing engravings and amazing stories.

I remember those old dignified merchants who served their customers with downcast eyes, in discreet silence, and who were full of wisdom and tolerance for their customers’ most secret whims. But most of all, I remember a bookshop in which I once glanced at some rare and forbidden pamphlets, the publications of secret societies lifting the veil on tantalizing and unknown mysteries” (89).

Familiar streets transformed into a marvelous labyrinth, time extending beyond its natural limits, an esoteric ‘other world’ concealed in the midst of the ordinary and everyday ~ this is the dreamy Drohobych of Schulz’s imagination, a mythic city described in rich prose that alternately drips with the golden juices of ripe fruit or scuttles mechanically on spidery legs or entices the mind with cryptic messages of mystical import.

The Street of Crocodiles is a weird and wondrous book. When Schulz was murdered at the age of fifty, shot by a Nazi soldier, the world lost a truly unique artist.

When I think about Bruno Schulz' life story, I always feel a pang in my heart. I'm known for my displays of pity regarding every living being, even trees (several nights ago, after a big storm, I found a young tree that was bent and was probably going to be cut down; I felt so sorry for it that went out, straightened it and tied it). So it's no surprise that the unjust death of Schulz and the disappearance of his other writing provokes a dull ache in my heart, especially after having an insight into his wonderful mind, through The Street of Crocodiles.

Reading about him, I've found out that he had no apparent influence from other writers. He lived in Drogobych all his life, being a recluse; he worked as a teacher of drawing and had a few friends, who had no idea of his literary aspirations. It was a lucky chance that one of his pen friends encouraged him to write - it was in these letters that his stories were shaped.

When Bruno Schulz's stories were reissued in Poland in 1957, translated into French and German, and acclaimed everywhere by a new generation of readers to whom he was unknown, attempts were made to place his oeuvre in the mainstream of Polish literature, to find affinities, derivations, to explain him in terms of one literary theory or another. The task is well nigh impossible. He was a solitary man, living apart, filled with his dreams, with memories of his childhood, with an intense, formidable inner life, a painter's imagination, a sensuality and responsiveness to physical stimuli which most probably could find satisfaction only in artistic creation — a volcano, smoldering silently in the isolation of a sleepy provincial town.

He must have had access to some unearthly world, full of rich wonderful things, that we, normal mortals, don't have the chance to get a glimpse of, other than through the writing of Bruno Schulz and gifted writers like him.

Reading The Street of Crocodiles was like having a brain orgasm: its rich metaphors were incessantly uplifting, its words caressed my mind without ever pausing. I was constantly marveling at the poetry of Schulz' prose. This could get tiring at times, because his stories never let me breath and slack, but kept requiring my ever-present attention. The task was made even more difficult because I've read the English translation and bumped into a lot of words that I didn't know, far more than in any other book I've read so far.

After tidying up, Adela would plunge the rooms into semidarkness by drawing down the linen blinds. All colors immediately fell an octave lower, the room filled with shadows, as if it had sunk to the bottom of the sea and the light was reflected in mirrors of green water — and the heat of the day began to breathe on the blinds as they stirred slightly in their daydreams. [...] Everyone in this golden day wore that grimace of heat — as if the sun had forced his worshipers to wear identical masks of gold.

Bruno Schulz is drawing inspiration from his childhood, but his writing leaves the reality at some point and wanders into imagination, blossoming into an explosion of smells and rich imagery. In the center of the stories lies Schulz' father, an almost surreal character, who gradually acquires the traits of a mythological being, wandering freely from reality into the fantastical realm. It reminded me of Danilo Kiš' [b:Garden, Ashes|217984|Garden, Ashes|Danilo Kiš|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347934698s/217984.jpg|211053], where the father was also the central, elusive figure.

Bruno's father is shaped as an eccentric, an almost lunatic, constantly taking an interest in peculiar things, such as the long-forgotten rooms where mold and dust had settled, creating a throbbing world that disappears the moment one opens the door. Or the tailor's dummy that is not simply an object, but imprisoned matter, tortured matter which does not know what it is and why it is, nor where the gesture may lead that has been imposed on it for ever. He is disgusted but also fascinated by cockroaches, imitating them to the point of becoming one (this is one of his resemblances to Kafka - [b:The Metamorphosis|485894|The Metamorphosis|Franz Kafka|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1359061917s/485894.jpg|2373750] - although some critics say that Schulz was not actually inspired by the first).

The father is presented on the brink of immediate death, but he always resurfaces with renewed energy, captivating the house once more, disturbing the peace and quiet with his follies. He is the antidote for boredom, in those days that hardened with cold and boredom like last year's loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.
At some point, the child is even convinced that his father had metamorphosed into a stuffed condor, echoing the absolutely gorgeous recount of the latter's passion for exotic birds, which were raised in the attic - one of my favorite parts of the book.

Not only the father, but also the outer world is presented in a poetic manner, bordering on surreal: the rooms with their shape-shifting wallpapers, the garden with lush vegetation, the end-of-the-world storm, the family shop with oceans and rivers of cloth, the cardboard town from the Street of Crocodiles, the alluring Cinnamon Shops. Everything in this book is a feast of senses and I don't have enough words to praise it.

Perhaps the city and the marketplace had ceased to exist, and the gale and the night had surrounded our house with dark stage props and some machinery to imitate the howling, whistling and groaning... We were increasingly inclined to think that the gale was only an invention of the night, a poor representation on a confined stage of the tragic immensity, the cosmic homelessness and loneliness of the wind.

You should definitely read The Street of Crocodiles, it is truly a literary gem.

Street of Crocodiles is a very haunting book, and the author's life story is even more bizarre. He was an artist and writer living in a Poland in 1941 under the occupation of the Nazis. He was kept alive because a particular officer liked his art. However, he was murdered by another officer when he was out one day. There seems to be a sort of cult for his works.

The book (Street of Crocodiles) centers around a family or very strange characters. The father who is quiet mad, imports rare bird eggs to hatch in his attic, believes that tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and has an obsessive fear of cockroaches.
Don't buy it. Just read it online along with his other works called Cinnamon Shops.

(I stole this info so I wouldn't forget)

Street of Crocodiles is a very haunting book, and the author's life story is even more bizarre. He was an artist and writer living in a Poland in 1941 under the occupation of the Nazis. He was kept alive because a particular officer liked his art. However, he was murdered by another officer when he was out one day. There seems to be a sort of cult for his works.

The book (Street of Crocodiles) centers around a family or very strange characters. The father who is quiet mad, imports rare bird eggs to hatch in his attic, believes that tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and has an obsessive fear of cockroaches.
Don't buy it. Just read it online along with his other works called Cinnamon Shops.

(I stole this info so I wouldn't forget)