Reviews

Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą by Bruno Schulz

mdpenguin's review against another edition

medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? N/A
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

Having loved Street of Crocodiles, this was a disappointment. In the former, I felt that the surrealism and absurd hyperbole managed to express the truth of the human experience of the lives of the characters and community being depicted. While there was some of that in Sanatorium, most of it felt less meaningful and more, perhaps, playful or just experimental. Some of it seemed like Schulz playing at Kafka rather than using his own voice. Street was also much more coherent, feeling like a novel made up of episodes in the lives of the family, whereas the stories in Sanatorium don't really feel particularly connected. Some of the stories were good, when when they felt less authentically of Schulz' voice. Most weren't memorable for me, though, and I found that some of it could be a bit tedious at times for me. Though I don't regret reading it or consider it a waste of my time, I'm glad that I read Street of Crocodiles first because I'm not sure that I'd have picked it up if I'd read this one first. 

scissor_stockings's review against another edition

dark slow-paced

1.0

gazakas's review against another edition

3.0

Reading this book was trully challenging; it's surrealism (reaching absurdity too often), along with the absence of a solid plot in most of its stories and a certain obsess with words, led me to consider abandoning it quite a few times. But then there were ingenious passages of real pleasure like the following and I was giving it a second chance:

“At such a time [at dawn] I would dream of being a baker who delivers bread, a fitter from the electric company, or an insurance man collecting the weekly installments. Or at least a chimney sweep. In the morning, at dawn, I would enter some half-opened gateway, still lighted by the watchman's lantern. I would put two fingers to my hat, crack a joke, and enter the labyrinth to leave late in the evening, at the other end of the city. I would spend all day going from apartment to apartment, conducting one never-ending conversation from one end of the city to the other, divided into parts among the householders; I would ask something in one apartment and receive a reply in another, make a joke in one place and collect the fruits of laughter in the third or fourth. Among the banging of doors I would squeeze through narrow passages, through bedrooms full of furniture, I would upset chamberpots, walk into squeaking perambulators in which babies cry, pick up rattles dropped by infants. I would stop for longer than necessary in kitchens and hallways, where servant girls were tidying up. The girls, busy, would stretch their young legs, tauten their high insteps, play with their cheap shining shoes, or clack around in loose slippers.”

All in all, it's a poetic book, suitable for those who love similes and metaphors ("It is part of my existence to be the parasite of metaphors, so easily am I carried away by the first simile that comes along. Having been carried away, I have to find my difficult way back, and slowly return to my senses."); those who want a proper story, should look elsewhere. Being myself somewhere in the middle, I'm giving it 3/5, acknowledging at the same time that Bruno Shulz is a very interesting writer.

matthewn's review against another edition

4.0

Not quite as beautiful as "Street of Crocodiles," but still extraordinary writing with tremendous insight and emotional impact.

coffeeandink's review against another edition

5.0

Weird Kafkaesque stories inspired by Jewish mysticism by Jewish Pole who died in the Holocaust -- contemporary of Kafka, not influenced by.