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A review by harryr
The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz: The Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz
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.