The Street Of Crocodiles And Other Stories Penguin Classics Deals on Bruno Schulz

The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories (Penguin Classics)

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Editorial Reviews

The collected fiction of "one of the most original imaginations in modern Europe" (Cynthia Ozick)

Bruno Schulz's untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Illustrated with Schulz's original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and influential writers.

Customer Reviews

INTERESTING, WONDERFUL, BEAUTIFUL

Reviewed by Swubird, 2010-01-04

The Street of Crocodiles: and Other Stories is a collection of interesting, wonderful and beautiful short stories, written by the late, great Bruno Schulz. It contains 33 stories in all, and each and every one was an absolute pleasure to read. I couldn't get enough.

Bruno Shultz was a painter first, and teacher of art, and his talent for producing fine paintings shows through in his writing. In this book, each story is itself like a beautiful painting, only applied to the paper with ink and words instead of paint and brushes on canvas. Personally, I have never read anything like these stories, and I know my short review can't possibly do this book any real justice. But I will say this, if you haven't read anything by Bruno Schulz, and you are in the mood for something truly interesting, and beautiful and written in the style of high literature, I mean literature at its very best, then read The Street of Crocodiles: and Other Stories. If only Bruno Schulz would have survived WW-II, I'm sure he would have been awarded the very highest honors for his literary talent. I give it five stars.

Shulz paints brightly colored pictures with words

Reviewed by History Fan, 2009-07-11

Shulz is a revelation. One must read Shulz for his florid and juicy language. It will make the reader envious and look more critically at the work of other writers. Of course, I read this book in English translation rather than the original Polish. For the record, Shulz was Polish, but had he not been murdered by a Nazi, he would today be Ukrainian. If his words are as beautiful and bursting with color, light and air in the original Polish as they are in English, he truly was a master. He creates expressions that are alive and on the money, e.g. "popping with the soft sound of crushed grasshoppers". The translator deserves kudos for being able to be so expressive in English. Shulz reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald in that his language is so beautiful and expressive that one reads and enjoys him without worrying too much about where the tales take one. I recommmend Shulz for anyone who enjoys beautiful, magnificent language and I commend the translator for losing nothing of the original grandeur of Shulz's work.

Tales of the Demiurge

Reviewed by Lennox of Orange, 2009-05-11

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.

Like nothing I've ever read before

Reviewed by Bryan Byrd, 2009-02-28

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.

Such stuff as dreams are made on...

Reviewed by Keith A. Comess, 2009-02-03

Bruno Schulz emerged from the now-vanished world of "Middle Europa". He left an indelible, but largely unrecognized stamp on modern literature.

Schulz's work is probably unique, not only in its artistic insights, but also in its precociousness relative to contemporary novelistic styles and preferences: the writing is redolent of twisted dreams, bizarre, fantastic and hallucinatory metaphors, queer observations, evocatively strange insights and, when combined with his Goya-like drawings, generates a perversely weird and haunting series of short novels.

His work seems to prefigure South American "magical realism", though the "supernaturalism" of that genre differs from Schulz's preoccupations. It has certain parallels to some of Kafka's work ("Metamorphosis" and "In the Penal Colony" come to mind) though the two writers were unknown to each other. The pure strangeness also evokes certain members of the school of early 20th century fantasy writers such as Lord Dunsany and Mervyn Peake. Frankly, if Albert Hoffman's pharmacologic discovery was known to Schultz, I would attribute some of the startling writing to a ergot-induced dream state.

Regrettably, Schulz was tragically, like so many others, consigned to a tragic and early oblivion by the Nazis. As a coda to that fact, an SS officer was so taken with Schultz's drawings that he extended him "special protection" in so far as he was permitted a small life outside the death ambit proscribed for non-conformers to National Socialist intellectual, cultural, religious and other rigid proscriptions. Frankly, he would not have prospered under the Stalinist brand of Marxism, either.

Despite his untimely end, his small body of work will likely garner critical acclaim as long as serious literature merits intelligent scrutiny. If you are entranced by the paintings of Heironymous Bosch and transfixed by the "Caprices" etchings of Goya; if you appreciate the strange, wonderful and exotic in literature, you should find tremendous gratification in Schulz.