A review by gazakas
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz

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.