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Guests | October 15, 2009

Michelle Wildgen: IMG A Few Initial and Not-Comprehensive Meditations on Group Novels



I am a sucker for a book about a group. What reminded me of this was Joanna Smith Rakoff's A Fortunate Age, her homage to Mary McCarthy's endlessly re-readable... Continue »

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The Street of Crocodiles (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

by Bruno Schulz

The Street of Crocodiles (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) Cover

Staff Pick

"Schulz is a master of metaphor, and his lush, poetic sentences burst with sensory detail. He transforms the pedestrian — salesgirls, brooms, bolts of cloth — into fantastic apparitions, lit with significance and color....Schulz's stories...are about reality and illusion, the perversion of order, and the luxurious overgrowth of imagination. Despite the attempts to anchor them by comparison, they are quite possibly like nothing you've ever read before."
Recommended by Jill Owens, Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable — and most chilling — is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one. Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew killed by the Nazis in 1942, is considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between the two world wars.

Review:

"Schulz's book is a masterpiece of comic writing; grave yet dignified, domestically plain yet poetic, exultant and forgiving, marvelously inventive, shy, and never raw." The New York Review of Books

Synopsis:

In the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Schulz's boyhood are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic.

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 2 comments:
pebbeb, December 14, 2006 (view all comments by pebbeb)
One of the most original novels I have ever read. Schulz writes with the same mystical and mythic quality that Marc Chagall paints. The book is poetic and makes me long to return to its pages again and again. Bruno Schulz is a breathtaking and I'm afraid, too often overlooked, writer. He expounds the boundaries of what can be done in literature.
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babylondoctrine, September 23, 2006 (view all comments by babylondoctrine)
This is beautiful writing. For Schulz, all objects have a life, all matter is animate.

"The Gale" describes the night that the contents of his small town's attics march out onto the streets. His "Treatise(s) on Tailor's Dummies" discuss a second Genesis which we are reminded that "Matter never makes jokes: it is always full of the deadly serious."

Schulz didn't survive World War II and only a few hundred pages of his writings exist.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780140186253
Author:
Schulz, Bruno
Publisher:
Penguin Books
Translator:
Wieniewski, Celina
Introduction:
Ficowski, Jerzy
Author:
Wieniewska, Celina
Author:
Ficowski, Jerzy
Subject:
General
Subject:
Fiction
Subject:
Poland
Subject:
Classics
Subject:
General Fiction
Series:
Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics
Publication Date:
March 1992
Binding:
Paperback
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Pages:
160
Dimensions:
7.73x5.03x.45 in. .32 lbs.

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