The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories (Penguin Classics)

A most wonderful discovery. For a mental map of the world of this marvelous writer, you could think of roots in Andersen's fairy tales, in Frankenstein fantasies, Jung's archetypes, Freud's dreams and nightmares, de Sade's philosophical attempts, Sacher-Masoch's dominant women, Kafka's strange worlds (right down to a proper metamorphosis), Anton Reichenow's ornithological guide books with their engravings, Gombrowicz's strange worlds (BS illustrated Ferdyduke), you might even suspect Thomas Mann to have his fingers in it.Shoots are found in Danilo Kis, or even in Salman Rushdie. One could see him as an ancestor of magical realism, but one should not blame him for that. One can also look at the theatre of the absurd.The man was working and living his artificially shortened life at the cross-roads of the inter-war avant-garde, in a Polish backwater. Schulz was a graphic artist and a writer in the Polish language, living and dying in a Jewish town that was Austrian at his birth, became Polish, was Soviet occupied, and then Nazi occupied at the time of his death, and later became Ukrainian.His death was absurd and tragically in line with the time: he was shot by a Nazi officer who met him outside the Jewish Ghetto, which he was not allowed to leave (except that he had been hired by a Gestapo officer to paint a mural inside his house; those paintings are now on show in Jerusalem's Yad Vashem, after a controversial transfer.)I must admit I never heard of him until maybe a year or two ago, when I read Danilo Kis, the Serbian author of `Garden, Ashes' and other masterpieces. If you never heard of Schulz, you may not be alone.Schulz published just two story collections during his lifetime. The two are included in this Penguin edition. The edition also includes his illustrations to some of the stories.The cover page of this book is taken from his graphics collection `A Booke of Idolatry'. It shows a woman putting her foot in a man's face. Women with powers are frequent in his stories, like the housemaid Adela. The Idolatry book seems to be mostly about similar images. You can visit his gallery at one of the dedicated websites.The book might with justification also be called a novel, with named short chapters offered as stories. The narrator is a boy whose mother runs a shop, and whose father is staying home, sick and dying, and doing crazy things. But the stories don't follow a time line. In one story the father has died, in a following one he is in the shop again. Or maybe he hasn't died properly, just morphed into a cockroach and come back.Father is a philosopher and heresiarch, a secondary would-be demiurge (not being content with creating tailor's dummies, he also dabbles at creating immortality by doing away with the principium individuationis, or simpler said by converting individuals into matter - alas with damaging consequences). Man is only a transit station for electrical currents!Adela shows up in most stories and does naughty things. Father fears her. Shop assistants lust for her.Birds are frequent. One of my favorite stories is called `Birds', an absurd tale about a man creating an aviary inside the family house by hatching exotic bird eggs and cross-breading the outcome, until Adela cleans up. Many of the stories do not tell a tale, really, but give us images and situations, without anything `happening'. Others are like dream tales; for instance the Cinnamon Shops, which provided the original title. The title Street of Crocodiles was chosen for the American edition.All poetry, in Schulz's view, is based on the discovery of ancient mythical relations between things.The second story collection, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, is in a way a sequel, dealing with the same people, in the centre father and son, who are now explicitly known as Jakob and Joseph. And don't forget Adela.There are more recognizable elements of memoirs. Joseph meets Bianca, a childhood girlfriend. He discovers his talent and passion for drawing. He discovers the marvels of stamps: they show us that Franz Josef I was not the ruler of the whole world!These subjects seem to sound like any other boy's stories, but believe me, Schulz does it differently.I notice I am stretching this too long and cut it short here. Go for it!

No homework!No plot summary! There's a plot against plotting, or plodding, on The Street of Crocodiles!No exegesis! Except perhaps (6aR,9R)- N,N- diethyl- 7-methyl- 4,6,6a,7,8,9- hexahydroindolo- [4,3-fg] quinoline- 9-carboxamide in a naturally occurring form."Just tell us why you like this book, Bobby Lou.""I like this book because the language is slinky and tastes like cinnamon cough syrup."You know that painting by Vincent van Gogh of a stiff wicker-bottomed chair, just a chair sitting patiently without a butt upon it? How profound that chair looks, yet you couldn't possibly say why? The colors,maybe? Can colors have meaning in and of themselves?Can music without words be more explicit than words?Can words be as untranslatable as music?Or as William Carlos Williams was wont to say: No meaning but in things.Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Kenneth Patchen were out fishing one day. They were baiting their hooks with pages of Bruno Schulz's lost Messiah.Page 84: ""There my father would sit, as if in an aviary, on a high stool; and the lofts of filing cabinets rustled with piles of paper and all the pigeonholes filled with the twitter of figures.""Page 109: ""Uncle Edward was ringing to high heaven through all those bright and empty rooms. The lonely deserter from the stars, conscience stricken, as if he had come to commit an evil dead, retreated stealthily from the apartment, deafened by the constant ringing. He went to the front door accompanied by the vigilant mirrors which let him through their starry ranks, while into their depths there tiptoed a swarm of doubles with fingers to their lips.""But lest you expire from anxiety, suffice it to say that Schulz's cockroach/magus father will avert the comet and save this jabberwocking planet of ours.Shall we assert that The Street of Crocodiles is a memoir of Schulz's childhood in a remote Jewish stetl in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary now part of Ukraine, written in Polish flavored with Latin in the tradition of Kakanian bureaucratic German? Shall we also mention that Schulz spent his entire life as a teacher in that seemingly dreary town, and that he was murdered in the street by an SS officer of the Nazi occupation in retaliation for the murder of that officer's 'pet' Jew by the officer who was protecting Schulz while Schulz painted his -the officer's - child's nursery? Shall we venture to imply that insensate rage and fear of humanism is a universal psychological marker of nationalism and rightist conservatism? No, let's not assert, mention, or venture. Let's not crack the lid of Pandora's lunchbox.Schulz's only other surviving works -- "Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass" plus three short stories -- are also included in this edition, all translated by Celina Wieniewska. Since I can't read a word of Polish, I have no idea how close Madam Wieniewska's English is to the original, but as English qua English, the writing in this book is rich and strange beyond anything I could quote. "Crocodiles" is so intense that I'm setting the book aside for a few days or weeks before plunging my aesthetic receptors into "Sanatorium." Consider this, therefore, half a review."Chapeau" to my amazoo cagemates Schneider and Byrd for coaxing me to read this incredible book!

I have only read about 50-60 pages of this book. At first I was mesmerized by it - the prose is truly beautiful, poetic, and rich in detail and substance. I think we also have to thank the translator for it. I stopped because I lost interest. It lacks substance. I'm usually a sucker for books that are beautifully written but do little in terms of plot (e.g. Virginia Woolf), but this is simply impossible to understand. I tried looking at it as symbolism and I'd wager some passages are about Nazi Germany, but as a whole it makes very little sense. I kept asking myself what I was reading, and why.Perhaps if you wish to read this, you need to be knowledgeable about the time this was written and know the author's life pretty well (aside from its dramatic end). Maybe then it will make some sort of sense. But now I just feel like I'm reading Kafka on Haldol. I'm giving this 3 stars for quality of prose only.

Full of startling stories that twist and turn down strange alleyways of the mind. I have never read any writer who creates a landscape that feels closer to dream. The manner of the death of the author gives the stories an added layer of tragedy, but the stories range widely, there are joyous pieces as well as the stuff of nightmares. A book that has to be read.

Got into the guy through the Quay Bros.Jewish,East European sensitivities between the 2 world wars.Superb short stories shot through with realism,amazing flights of fancy all wrapped up in an adolescents view..Startlingly honest and a marvellous evocation of the times and philosophiesswirling around mid european states soon to be consumed by Fascism of the right and left.

I read this book at school, in Polish and I fell in love with Schultz's style - so ornamental, rich and poetic! I am happy to report that this translation is excellent and as easy and enjoyable to read as the original.

シュルッツの作品は日本語の作品集と全集で読んでいます。じっくり読むと面白い小説です。ポーランド語では読めませんが、英語ならどう表現しているのだろう、とおもい、今回購入しました。日本語で読むのとでは、ちょっと雰囲気が異なり、おもしろいです。これも読書の楽しみです。値段もそんなに高くなく、日本語訳とあわせて持っていれば意外と楽しめると思います。シュルッツの作品は独得の雰囲気があり、捨てがたい小説家です。シュルッツを読みだしてから四十年以上たちますが、いつのまにかF・カフカの小説をあまり読まなくなりました。もっと読まれていい小説家であり、すぐれた二十世紀前半ではおそらくただ一人のクリシェベールという版画の作家でもあり、あわせて見ると面白いです。