Book Notes: The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories by Bruno Schulz

The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories By Bruno Schulz

Finished 3/29/20

My reading of late seems to consist largely of following up on things I discovered in Jeff and Ann Vandermeer’s Anthology “The Weird” and this book is no exception–Schulz’s bizarre story “Sanitarium under the Sign of the Hourglass” is reprinted there. Ironically, upon reading this collection of Schulz’s short stories, I discovered that I had met the author earlier than The Weird–the epigraph of China Mieville’s masterful “The City and the City” was from Schulz’s story “Cinnamon Shops” :

“Deep inside the town there open up, so to speak, double streets, doppelgänger streets, mendacious and delusive streets”

Schulz is apparently a literary legend in his native Poland, and among late 20th century Jewish authors, scholars, and artists. A figure of the Interwar eastern European Avant-Garde, he was an artist and illustrator of some note, and he wrote two collections of stories (both reprinted here, I believe) as well as a now-lost novel, before being murdered in a power-struggle between two Nazi officers during the occupation of Poland. The two introductory essays in this edition, one by Jonathan Safran Foer and the other by David Goldfarb, helped to put Schulz’s astonishing and complex writing in a historical context for me.

The aforementioned epigraph gets at one of the aspects of Schulz’s complexity that is apparent from the beginning–the animacy of the mundane world. For Schulz, seemingly neutral things are alive or at least animate. Streets can be “medacious and delusive.” Seasons (he wrote a lot about seasons) can mutate humans emotionally and even physically. Mannequins and dummies come to life and try without success to live as humans. Buildings and neighborhoods change and warp as we walk through them. For Schulz, the mundane, material world is in some ways more interesting than the actions of the humans who wander through it.

Schulz’s prose is rich to the point of being, at times, dense. This could be a function of the translation by Celina Wieniewska, but the essays and other writing about Schulz suggest that his lush prose moves across language barriers. Simple declarative or descriptive sentences gradually unfurl into metaphors that build on top of each other by the end of the long paragraphs. A prosaic act like a relative going shopping becomes sumptuously sensual:

On those luminous mornings Adela returned from the market, like Pomona emerging from the flames of day, spilling from her basket the coloful beauty of the sun –the shiny pink cherries full of juice under their transparent skins, the mysterious apricots in whose golden pulp lay the core of long afternoons. And next to that pure poetry of fruit, she unloaded sides of meat with their keyboard of ribs swollen with energy and strength, and seaweeds of vegetables like dead octopuses and squids–the raw material of meals with a yet undefined taste, the vegetative and terrestrial ingredients of dinner, exuding a wild and rustic smell.

This is compounded by Schulz’s probing interest in the psychology and motivations of his subjects, and the relation of those motivations to everyday behaviors or physical characteristics. There were times when I found it difficut to follow, but it was also clear that Schulz’s language  choices were multivalent and brilliantly integrated with the form and plot. Certainly his writing demands respect, even if every single story isn’t always completely captivating or required close reading.

Plot is generally secondary to character and tone, but there are some genuinely interesting and bizarre stories lurking in this collection. The aforementioned “Sanitorium…” is almost a ghost story, where a son goes to find his dying/dead father convalescing in a place where time operates differently, for individuals and for societies. The character of the father grows appears across multiple stories, growing stranger and stranger, becoming obsessed with obscure and mysterious subjects, even physically transforming into different creatures. “The comet” tells the story of an alien visitation that never really takes place, but explores instead the apprehensiveness and alienation of people to its approach.

All in all, a difficult but fascinating collection that rewards slow, invested reading.