Take a photo of a barcode or cover
teresatumminello 's review for:
4.75
This is like nothing I’ve read before. Take [a:Franz Kafka|5223|Franz Kafka|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1495464914p2/5223.jpg], [a:Marcel Proust|233619|Marcel Proust|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1392271688p2/233619.jpg] and [a:Jorge Luis Borges|500|Jorge Luis Borges|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1537559279p2/500.jpg]; shake them up; rearrange the splinters into a collage of expressionism; and still this is like nothing I’ve read before.
A father becomes a cockroach, a large bird, a crustacean; an aunt burns in a fit of anger into a pile of ashes. The young narrator remembers a book, the Book of all Books, from when he was even younger and despairs at his family’s cavalier attitude when he discovers its fate. A postage-stamp album is the entryway into a life of love, war, jealousy, and sacrifice. Death exists at the same time it is delayed. Mirrors don’t merely reflect: They hint at the other worlds they contain. Old men soar above the ground as if they are in a Chagall painting.
The stories do not stop when the characters fall asleep, only to pick up again when they awake. Instead, the rooms of the house expand; the walls, curtains, and furniture pulsate; the minds of the sleepers reach out to one another or across the city, except when they don’t. In many cases the active sleeping is the eventful climax of a story.
Above all, it is the language that delights. Within an elegant structure of sentences, the imagery invokes all the senses so plentifully that every yellow horizon, every crack between buildings, every single thing, is alive.
To quote the old-age pensioner:
This is like nothing I’ve read before. Take [a:Franz Kafka|5223|Franz Kafka|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1495464914p2/5223.jpg], [a:Marcel Proust|233619|Marcel Proust|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1392271688p2/233619.jpg] and [a:Jorge Luis Borges|500|Jorge Luis Borges|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1537559279p2/500.jpg]; shake them up; rearrange the splinters into a collage of expressionism; and still this is like nothing I’ve read before.
A father becomes a cockroach, a large bird, a crustacean; an aunt burns in a fit of anger into a pile of ashes. The young narrator remembers a book, the Book of all Books, from when he was even younger and despairs at his family’s cavalier attitude when he discovers its fate. A postage-stamp album is the entryway into a life of love, war, jealousy, and sacrifice. Death exists at the same time it is delayed. Mirrors don’t merely reflect: They hint at the other worlds they contain. Old men soar above the ground as if they are in a Chagall painting.
The stories do not stop when the characters fall asleep, only to pick up again when they awake. Instead, the rooms of the house expand; the walls, curtains, and furniture pulsate; the minds of the sleepers reach out to one another or across the city, except when they don’t. In many cases the active sleeping is the eventful climax of a story.
Above all, it is the language that delights. Within an elegant structure of sentences, the imagery invokes all the senses so plentifully that every yellow horizon, every crack between buildings, every single thing, is alive.
To quote the old-age pensioner:
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.Always with full use of his senses, Schulz may at times drop the similes, but never the metaphors.