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celeryradishpun's review against another edition
2.0
I apologize for not loving this book--liking it, even. I wish I could have read it in its original text, alas, I don't know a word of Polish. I read a review on here that you should read this book for its prose and not for the plot. While I can agree that the plot is not the high note of this book, I can't say the prose is either. It's overwrought with adjectives. Again, it may be better in its original text. I'm sorry, but I cannot enjoy reading a page that is 3/4 adjectives. I read this book because Jonathan Safran Foer loves it and paid homage to it with Tree of Codes. Unlike Foer, who sucks me in with his writing, I felt like I was floating along Schulz's words. Hovering above them. Bored. There were some great lines, great quotes I pulled from reading this, and the story I enjoyed most was about a little puppy named Nimrod (I also enjoyed The Book story).
"Coming through the garden to visit her, we passed numerous colored glass balls stuck on flimsy poles. In these pink, green, and violet balls were enclosed bright shining words, like the ideally happy pictures contained in the peerless perfection of soap bubbles."
"In the rapid process of blossoming, enormous white and pink flowers opened among the leaves, bursting from bud under your very eyes, displaying their pink pulp and spilling over to shed their petals and fall apart in quick decay."
"When you lay in the grass you were under the azure map of clouds and sailing continents, you inhaled the whole geography of the sky."
"Probably one by one those jesters sank into the cracks and folds of the terrain, like children tired of playing who disappear during a party in to the corners and back rooms of the festive house."
"For, under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don't we secretly clasp each other's hands?" (Renee, I think you'll like this one. Non?)
"I spent my days alone with my father in our room, which at that time was as large as the world."
"He was one of those men on whose head God lays His hand while they are asleep so that they get to know what they don't know, so that they are filled with intuitions and conjectures, while the reflections of distant worlds pass across their closed eyelids."
It's taken me forever to read, and I'm happy to be done with it. It's a relief.
"Coming through the garden to visit her, we passed numerous colored glass balls stuck on flimsy poles. In these pink, green, and violet balls were enclosed bright shining words, like the ideally happy pictures contained in the peerless perfection of soap bubbles."
"In the rapid process of blossoming, enormous white and pink flowers opened among the leaves, bursting from bud under your very eyes, displaying their pink pulp and spilling over to shed their petals and fall apart in quick decay."
"When you lay in the grass you were under the azure map of clouds and sailing continents, you inhaled the whole geography of the sky."
"Probably one by one those jesters sank into the cracks and folds of the terrain, like children tired of playing who disappear during a party in to the corners and back rooms of the festive house."
"For, under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don't we secretly clasp each other's hands?" (Renee, I think you'll like this one. Non?)
"I spent my days alone with my father in our room, which at that time was as large as the world."
"He was one of those men on whose head God lays His hand while they are asleep so that they get to know what they don't know, so that they are filled with intuitions and conjectures, while the reflections of distant worlds pass across their closed eyelids."
It's taken me forever to read, and I'm happy to be done with it. It's a relief.
timshel's review against another edition
3.0
Admittedly, I only read the title story, about 1/3 of the entire collection, but I figured this counted as something. The language is lovely, especially at the beginning where it hit me like a sudden downpour. Schulz was an undisputed master of language. Despite the story's richness, it was a struggle to read. Each chapter was a vignette without story; the whole added up to a bunch of nonsense. The only way I could make it through was to treat it like poetry, reading one piece at a time, slowly, focusing mostly on the language.
jaxcatx's review against another edition
I got half way through and realized that i didn't know what was going on...if anything was going on. I figure that if you're halfway through a book and you still don't know then what's the point of finishing it?
It wasn't a bad book, i'm probably just too dumb to 'get' it.
It wasn't a bad book, i'm probably just too dumb to 'get' it.
joceraptor's review against another edition
this is going to be one of those books that i can't rate because i don't think i understood much of it at all. the last two chapters (stories?) finally clicked for me in terms of writing, but i was lost for the other 98%.
acorn's review against another edition
5.0
I just finished Tree of Codes, and whilst not as enamored with it as with Jonathan Safran Foer's other work, I was struck by the unusual turns of phrase. It seemed like a novel by deletion had worked for Foer, because he managed to place evocative but ultimately distant words next to each other, and the effect was beautiful.
Little did I know, they're all there in the original, only richer and more satisfying. If I had been carrying around post-it flags and a pen while I read this book, I think every other page would have exuberant underlinings and exclamation marks and asterisks and "THIS!!!" hastily scrawled in the margins, with little pink and orange squares jutting out haphazardly from the corners. It's a stunning book, bizarrely and yet beautifully written.
I wish, I wish, I wish that the rest of Schultz's work hadn't been lost. This is one of my absolute favorites and the thought that there is more out there of this that I can't read just kills me.
Little did I know, they're all there in the original, only richer and more satisfying. If I had been carrying around post-it flags and a pen while I read this book, I think every other page would have exuberant underlinings and exclamation marks and asterisks and "THIS!!!" hastily scrawled in the margins, with little pink and orange squares jutting out haphazardly from the corners. It's a stunning book, bizarrely and yet beautifully written.
I wish, I wish, I wish that the rest of Schultz's work hadn't been lost. This is one of my absolute favorites and the thought that there is more out there of this that I can't read just kills me.
daneekasghost's review against another edition
4.0
Schulz's surrealism works really well and all his stories feel interconnected so this feels like one big work instead of fragments. I loved most the stories about his father (and his ongoing battle with the cleaning lady) culminating with "Father's Last Escape" as the final story in Sanatorium. Like Kafka, but less pessimistic.
Street of Crocodiles - 4.5/5
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass - 3/5
"Father's Last Escape" - 5/5
Street of Crocodiles - 4.5/5
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass - 3/5
"Father's Last Escape" - 5/5
harryr's review against another edition
4.0
I actually have this in a combined Kindle edition with Schulz's other book, [b:Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass|359559|Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass|Bruno Schulz|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1395149881s/359559.jpg|1452942], which I probably will read but not perhaps immediately. I need a bit of a breather.
I bought it some time ago after reading Jonathan Safran Foer's curious book [b:Tree of Codes|9583799|Tree of Codes|Jonathan Safran Foer|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327875179s/9583799.jpg|14470746], which is created by taking one of Schulz's stories and physically cutting words out of the pages, leaving it riddled with holes.
You can see why JSF would be attracted to Schulz: it is highly stylised writing about a domestic, contemporary milieu, but full of magical, surrealist events. There's also the Polish, Jewish connection, as explored in JSF's [b:Everything Is Illuminated|256566|Everything Is Illuminated|Jonathan Safran Foer|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327865538s/256566.jpg|886727]. Other obvious comparisons might be Kafka and Chagall: artists who seem deeply rooted in a time and place but who render it strange and dreamlike. And I'm sure this aesthetic isn't entirely confined to Eastern European Jews of the early C20th, although I'm drawing a blank at the moment. It seems to me quite different from the magical realists, for examples, b/c it isn't grounded by the structures of realist fiction in the same way. Maybe Murakami is bit similar?
It is definitely well-written and I did enjoy it, but in a lot of ways it's not really to my taste It's very lushly written, sometimes using two or three similes to describe something, one after another. And I find a little goes a long way with formless, dream-logic narratives; I was really struck by the first couple of stories, but diminishing returns started to kick in after a while.
I bought it some time ago after reading Jonathan Safran Foer's curious book [b:Tree of Codes|9583799|Tree of Codes|Jonathan Safran Foer|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327875179s/9583799.jpg|14470746], which is created by taking one of Schulz's stories and physically cutting words out of the pages, leaving it riddled with holes.
You can see why JSF would be attracted to Schulz: it is highly stylised writing about a domestic, contemporary milieu, but full of magical, surrealist events. There's also the Polish, Jewish connection, as explored in JSF's [b:Everything Is Illuminated|256566|Everything Is Illuminated|Jonathan Safran Foer|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327865538s/256566.jpg|886727]. Other obvious comparisons might be Kafka and Chagall: artists who seem deeply rooted in a time and place but who render it strange and dreamlike. And I'm sure this aesthetic isn't entirely confined to Eastern European Jews of the early C20th, although I'm drawing a blank at the moment. It seems to me quite different from the magical realists, for examples, b/c it isn't grounded by the structures of realist fiction in the same way. Maybe Murakami is bit similar?
It is definitely well-written and I did enjoy it, but in a lot of ways it's not really to my taste It's very lushly written, sometimes using two or three similes to describe something, one after another. And I find a little goes a long way with formless, dream-logic narratives; I was really struck by the first couple of stories, but diminishing returns started to kick in after a while.
arirang's review against another edition
3.0
Duplicate streets, doppelganger streets, lying and deceptive streets, so to speak, reveal themselves in the depths of the city.
from The Cinnamon Shops
Fans of China Mieville's The City and The City (I'm not one! - see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1809136762) will recognise that quote, in a slightly different translation by John Curran Davis, as the epigraph and perhaps the inspiration of that novel.
And Mieville joins a long list of authors with an acknowledged debt to Bruno Schulz in their work, borrowing quotations, characters, aspects of his life (in addition to the undoubted many on whom his influence is less explicitly noted) such as:
- 2017 MBI winning David Grossman - whose See Under: Love is based around the story of Schulz's death (under the protection of one Gestapo officer in occupied Poland, he was shot in the street by a rival officer), except in his novel the narrator helps him escape his fate by turning him into a salmom
- the legendary Roberto Bolaño: the narrator of his Distant Star reads Schulz's work during the story
- Booker of Booker winning Salman Rushdie, whose Moor's Last Sigh recreates Schulz's Street of Crocodiles but in Andalucia:
I felt as if I were in some sort of interregnum, in some timeless zone under the sign of an hourglass in which the sand stood motionless, or a clepsydra whose quicksilver had ceased to flow. […] I wandered down sausage-festooned streets of bakeries and cinnamon shops, smelling, instead, the sweet scents of meat and pastries and fresh-baked bread, and surrendered myself to the cryptic laws of the town.
(Rushdie: The Moor's Last Sigh)
- Danilo Kiš whose "family trilogy" owes a large debt to Schulz (“Schulz is my God” he told John Updike): e.g. the title of the last of the trilogy Hourglass rather echoes Schulz's Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass and his Treatise on the Potato therein Schulz' Treatise on Tailors' Dummies
- Jonathan Safran Foer whose Tree of Codes is formed from cutting up his favourite book of all - Schulz's Street of Crocodiles (the words Tree of Codes can be made from a subset of the letters in Street of Crocodiles)
as well as others such as Cynthia Ozick (The Messiah of Stockholm), Philip Roth (the Czech author in The Prague Orgy is essentially Schulz) and Nicole Krauss (The History of Love).
(see http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/06/appropriations-of-bruno-schulz/ for a more detailed survey)
Several of those books are based on the legend of Schulz's lost work, The Messiah, a work some scholars believe perhaps never existed. But what we have hear is the work that Schulz did complete in his brief lifetime - the two story collections The Cinnamon Streets & Other Stories (the original English language publisher chose to present it under the title of another story, The Street of Crocodiles, against the translator's wishes) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, as well as some miscellania.
The lazy reviewers guide to Bruno Schulz would be [a:Witold Gombrowicz|9632|Witold Gombrowicz|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1408973878p2/9632.jpg] meets [a:Franz Kafka|5223|Franz Kafka|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1495464914p2/5223.jpg], and it is not hard to apparently see the influence of the latter, particularly in The Cinnamon Shops collection:
Many of the stories concern his increasingly eccentric father, who first develops a mania for birds which starts with collecting and incubating rare eggs, but ends with him taking on avian-like characteristics himself, then becomes obsessed with cockroaches, again starting to resemble one himself (my father was turning into a cockroach). Querying his father's absence, the narrator asks his mother whether his father is now one of the cockroaches in the house, or perhaps instead the stuffed condor, the last remnant of his avian obsession, although his mother retorts: I already told you that father is travelling about the country as a travelling salesman.
Or in the labyrinth corridors of the family home, rooms that disappear or come literally alive, and also the confusion of the city's streets (see the opening quotes) or houses:
Having entered the wrong vestibule and the wrong stairwell, one usually wound up in a veritable labyrinth of unfamiliar apartments and passageways, unexpected exits into unfamiliar courtyards, and one forgot the original goal of the expedition, until, many days later, while returning on some grey dawn from the uncharted territories of strange, matted adventures, one remembered amid pangs of conscience one's family home.
But to spoil the story, while Schulz was to translate Kafka into Polish, he apparently only read Kafka after he was sent a copy to review following the publication of The Cinnamon Shops. One can instead perhaps, equally lazily, suggest they drew on the same (post) Austro-Hungarian empire world of bureaucracy breaking down and mitteleuropean melancholia.
The reality is that Schulz has a surreal style all of his own - one that I can admire sometimes more than appreciate. The narrator's of Distant Star (see above) sums the effect up well: “The words went scuttling past like beetles, busy at incomprehensible tasks.”
I read Schulz's works in 2004, and again a few years later. The reason for revisiting them now is the publication of a new translation by Madeline Levine, the original works having been brought into English in the 1960-1970s by Celina Wieniewska.
I'm not, as a rule, a massive fan of retranslations of classic works. There is far too much great but untranslated literature that would better command an enthusiastic translator's attention, and much retranslation does seem to be nitpicking with the original - the occasional case where the original was badly flawed tends to be the exception rather than the rule.
Here I was pleased to see that Levine praises the 'undeniable magic of Wieniewska's English version.' She justifies retranslation generally on the grounds that "the richer the original, the more interpretations it can sustain. Translation is both a scholarly art and a performance,' which is fair enough but still leaves my concern with efficient use of translation resources.
Specifically, she argues that while her predecessor 'intended to convey the visual images and bizarre events that distinguish Schulz's stories,' she did this by 'taming his prose.' Levine's aim is to 'get closer to the texture of Schulz's prose by stretching English syntax to make it accommodate the sinousity of Schulz's longer sentences rather than reigning them in,' and also to closer mirror Schulz's repetition and alliteration and the use, as much as possible, of the prefix dis- (mirroring an equivalent Polish term).
I must admit I struggled, comparing the translations side by side, to detect such a significant difference, other perhaps than Levine drawing on a richer English vocabulary. Compare for example the literally labyrinthine sentence above to Wieniewska's version.
For, once you had entered the wrong doorway and set foot on the wrong staircase, you were liable to find oneself in a real labyrinth of unfamiliar apartments and balconies, and unexpected doors opening onto strange empty courtyards, and you forgot the initial object of the expedition, only to recall it days later after numerous strange and complicated adventures, on regaining the family home in the grey light of dawn.
See this for a further discussion: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2017/09/20/the-good-bad-translator-celina-wieniewska-and-her-bruno-schulz/
And see also Curran Davis on the reason he did a retranslation http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/01/interview-translator-john-curran-davis-on-polish-writer-bruno-schulz/
So overall Schulz is an author one ought to read if only for his profound influence on others. This translation will likely become the new standard, but I wouldn't particularly recommend it as a vital choice over the existing one.
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.
from The Cinnamon Shops
Fans of China Mieville's The City and The City (I'm not one! - see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1809136762) will recognise that quote, in a slightly different translation by John Curran Davis, as the epigraph and perhaps the inspiration of that novel.
And Mieville joins a long list of authors with an acknowledged debt to Bruno Schulz in their work, borrowing quotations, characters, aspects of his life (in addition to the undoubted many on whom his influence is less explicitly noted) such as:
- 2017 MBI winning David Grossman - whose See Under: Love is based around the story of Schulz's death (under the protection of one Gestapo officer in occupied Poland, he was shot in the street by a rival officer), except in his novel the narrator helps him escape his fate by turning him into a salmom
- the legendary Roberto Bolaño: the narrator of his Distant Star reads Schulz's work during the story
- Booker of Booker winning Salman Rushdie, whose Moor's Last Sigh recreates Schulz's Street of Crocodiles but in Andalucia:
I felt as if I were in some sort of interregnum, in some timeless zone under the sign of an hourglass in which the sand stood motionless, or a clepsydra whose quicksilver had ceased to flow. […] I wandered down sausage-festooned streets of bakeries and cinnamon shops, smelling, instead, the sweet scents of meat and pastries and fresh-baked bread, and surrendered myself to the cryptic laws of the town.
(Rushdie: The Moor's Last Sigh)
- Danilo Kiš whose "family trilogy" owes a large debt to Schulz (“Schulz is my God” he told John Updike): e.g. the title of the last of the trilogy Hourglass rather echoes Schulz's Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass and his Treatise on the Potato therein Schulz' Treatise on Tailors' Dummies
- Jonathan Safran Foer whose Tree of Codes is formed from cutting up his favourite book of all - Schulz's Street of Crocodiles (the words Tree of Codes can be made from a subset of the letters in Street of Crocodiles)
as well as others such as Cynthia Ozick (The Messiah of Stockholm), Philip Roth (the Czech author in The Prague Orgy is essentially Schulz) and Nicole Krauss (The History of Love).
(see http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/06/appropriations-of-bruno-schulz/ for a more detailed survey)
Several of those books are based on the legend of Schulz's lost work, The Messiah, a work some scholars believe perhaps never existed. But what we have hear is the work that Schulz did complete in his brief lifetime - the two story collections The Cinnamon Streets & Other Stories (the original English language publisher chose to present it under the title of another story, The Street of Crocodiles, against the translator's wishes) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, as well as some miscellania.
The lazy reviewers guide to Bruno Schulz would be [a:Witold Gombrowicz|9632|Witold Gombrowicz|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1408973878p2/9632.jpg] meets [a:Franz Kafka|5223|Franz Kafka|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1495464914p2/5223.jpg], and it is not hard to apparently see the influence of the latter, particularly in The Cinnamon Shops collection:
Many of the stories concern his increasingly eccentric father, who first develops a mania for birds which starts with collecting and incubating rare eggs, but ends with him taking on avian-like characteristics himself, then becomes obsessed with cockroaches, again starting to resemble one himself (my father was turning into a cockroach). Querying his father's absence, the narrator asks his mother whether his father is now one of the cockroaches in the house, or perhaps instead the stuffed condor, the last remnant of his avian obsession, although his mother retorts: I already told you that father is travelling about the country as a travelling salesman.
Or in the labyrinth corridors of the family home, rooms that disappear or come literally alive, and also the confusion of the city's streets (see the opening quotes) or houses:
Having entered the wrong vestibule and the wrong stairwell, one usually wound up in a veritable labyrinth of unfamiliar apartments and passageways, unexpected exits into unfamiliar courtyards, and one forgot the original goal of the expedition, until, many days later, while returning on some grey dawn from the uncharted territories of strange, matted adventures, one remembered amid pangs of conscience one's family home.
But to spoil the story, while Schulz was to translate Kafka into Polish, he apparently only read Kafka after he was sent a copy to review following the publication of The Cinnamon Shops. One can instead perhaps, equally lazily, suggest they drew on the same (post) Austro-Hungarian empire world of bureaucracy breaking down and mitteleuropean melancholia.
The reality is that Schulz has a surreal style all of his own - one that I can admire sometimes more than appreciate. The narrator's of Distant Star (see above) sums the effect up well: “The words went scuttling past like beetles, busy at incomprehensible tasks.”
I read Schulz's works in 2004, and again a few years later. The reason for revisiting them now is the publication of a new translation by Madeline Levine, the original works having been brought into English in the 1960-1970s by Celina Wieniewska.
I'm not, as a rule, a massive fan of retranslations of classic works. There is far too much great but untranslated literature that would better command an enthusiastic translator's attention, and much retranslation does seem to be nitpicking with the original - the occasional case where the original was badly flawed tends to be the exception rather than the rule.
Here I was pleased to see that Levine praises the 'undeniable magic of Wieniewska's English version.' She justifies retranslation generally on the grounds that "the richer the original, the more interpretations it can sustain. Translation is both a scholarly art and a performance,' which is fair enough but still leaves my concern with efficient use of translation resources.
Specifically, she argues that while her predecessor 'intended to convey the visual images and bizarre events that distinguish Schulz's stories,' she did this by 'taming his prose.' Levine's aim is to 'get closer to the texture of Schulz's prose by stretching English syntax to make it accommodate the sinousity of Schulz's longer sentences rather than reigning them in,' and also to closer mirror Schulz's repetition and alliteration and the use, as much as possible, of the prefix dis- (mirroring an equivalent Polish term).
I must admit I struggled, comparing the translations side by side, to detect such a significant difference, other perhaps than Levine drawing on a richer English vocabulary. Compare for example the literally labyrinthine sentence above to Wieniewska's version.
For, once you had entered the wrong doorway and set foot on the wrong staircase, you were liable to find oneself in a real labyrinth of unfamiliar apartments and balconies, and unexpected doors opening onto strange empty courtyards, and you forgot the initial object of the expedition, only to recall it days later after numerous strange and complicated adventures, on regaining the family home in the grey light of dawn.
See this for a further discussion: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2017/09/20/the-good-bad-translator-celina-wieniewska-and-her-bruno-schulz/
And see also Curran Davis on the reason he did a retranslation http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/01/interview-translator-john-curran-davis-on-polish-writer-bruno-schulz/
So overall Schulz is an author one ought to read if only for his profound influence on others. This translation will likely become the new standard, but I wouldn't particularly recommend it as a vital choice over the existing one.
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.
rafalreadersinitiative's review against another edition
2.0
Jedna z tych książek, które naprawdę trudno ocenić. Z jednej strony zachwyca retoryką, poetyką i bogactwem opisów, oraz tkwiącą korzeniami w surrealizmie narracją. Z drugiej wszystko odczuwa się niczym sen, jakkolwiek piękny i w przedziwny sposób poruszający, to jednocześnie fragmentarycznie tylko zrozumiały i - nawet - męczący, czy raczej wymagający od czytelnika skupienia, a potem głębszej analizy, bez tego nie poddający się próbom interpretacji. Z trudem przychodzi mi to napisać, ale jednak nie jest to rodzaj literatury - a bynajmniej nie w ten sposób podany - jaki bym sam sobie polecił. Przeczytanie "Sklepów cynamonowych" było dla mnie swego rodzaju eksperymentem, ostatecznie jednak nie do końca udanym.
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