A fantastic book of short stories translated from their original text. Translated works are always hit or miss and this one ended up being a gem. While the ornate prose might be a turn off for some people, I was taken in by the writing.

These stories are a fabulous blend of romantic animism partaking of all the senses, fantastical tall tales, and wacky philosophies, all usually rendered from a precocious child’s perspective. His writing is distinctive and unique, but I appreciate how others reach for some kind of hybrid of Kafka, Calvino, and Borges to forge a comparative description. And I have no trouble imagining likely influences on the ornate gothic fantasies of Lovecraft, the fractured fairy tales of Angela Carter, and the alternative realities of China Mieville. I was already sensitized to the wonders of Schulz from references to his “Street of Crocodiles” in Nicole Kraus’ “History of Love” and an epigram from it in Mieville’s “The City and the City,” but it took a wonderful review from Goodreads’ friend Fionnuala to really make me hunger to read this author. Her extra attention to his eerie and comic drawings is definitely worth a side trip or revisit : <a href=" https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1540583392">The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories</a>.

My sense of the collection is best described in this late 19th century drawing by Heinrich Kley:
<img src="http://kunstundfilm.de/wp-content/gallery/lockruf-der-decadence/Heinrich-Kley.jpg" width="400" height="317"/>

The author was a Polish-speaking Jew who lived his whole life in a small town in the Galicia region formerly of the Polish Kingdom, then of the Austrian Empire, and then, after 1939, Ukraine. He worked as a school teacher and illustrator and took up writing as an extension of skills developed as a storyteller to tame his unruly students. He published but two slim volumes of stories in a life cut short by getting gunned down in the street by a Nazi in 1942, supposedly over a difference with another officer who kept him out of the local ghetto roundup for the camps in exchange for painting him a mural (see David Grossman’s “Age of Genius: The Legend of Bruno Schulz, The New Yorker, 2009 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/06/08/the-age-of-genius). This edition of his work is a complete set of his collected stories and a few other pieces in a new translation by Univ. of North Carolina professor Medline Levine, who has previously tackled Czeslaw Milosz and two other Polish writers. This volume lacks the illustrations available in earlier editions of his work.

Schulz tales often feature an imaginative boy growing up in this small town with parents who ran a cloth store on the floor below their apartment, a family which resembles that of the author’s. The father Jakub inspires the boy with his odd hobbies and obsessions with alternative visions of reality. The boom and bust of his business often leans to the latter, so the family is often close to poverty. But the boy has the world of books and the creative outlet of fantasy play with his friends in the neighborhood.
In the face of boring schoolwork and the grim, gray weather of fall and winter, young Bruno finds escape by applying his fertile imagination to everything he experiences. Windstorms can come off as monstrously malevolent or apocalyptic in nature. The advance of nightfall in seasons of short days can come off as an invasion like an epidemic of death:
<i>The pestilence of dusk spread everywhere treacherously and poisonously, moved from one thing to another, and whatever it touched decayed instantly, turned black, disintegrated into rotten wood. People fled from the dusk in quiet panic and suddenly leprosy was catching up with them, spilling onto their foreheads as a dark rash; they lost their faces, which fell off in great, shapeless patches …. </i>

The mad dance of spring can be a delight to the boy, but sometimes it’s riot and pansexuality seems ominously out of control. The family garden has one end open to the sun and “full of the milk of the heavens and the airs”, while at the other, darker end:
<i>it turned surly and careless, letting itself go wild and unkempt, grew fierce with nettles, bustled with thistles, turned mangy with all sort of weeds …
There it was no longer an orchard but a paroxysm of madness, an explosion of fury, a cynical shamelessness and debauchery. There, completely out of control, the barren burdock cabbage heads proliferated, opening the floodgates of their poison—enormous witches, disrobing in broad daylight, shedding their ample skirts, flinging them off one after another, until their puffed-up, rustling, tattered rags buried under themselves with their frantic layers the rambunctious bastard tribe.</i>

Notice his technique of piling on one metaphor after another until your brain brims over trying to hold onto the vision. I got a lot of pleasure from the similar way Schulz elaborates some of the boy’s fantasies one step at a time until, like with a rollercoaster, you go over the top into absurdity. For example, the boy tries to construct a conception of the world through study of his friend Rudolph’s stamp collection:

<i>Dark, ardent, full of festering love, I took in a parade of creation, marching land, shining processions that I saw in intervals through purple eclipses, deafened by the blows of the blood beating in my heart in time to this universal march of all nations.</i>

He wonders about the nobility and refinement of the mind of Franz Josef I, Emperor of Austria-Hungary, basks in the exotic colors of the flora and fauna in stamps from tropical paradises, and imagines intrigue behind the emperor’s brother Maximillian getting posted to Mexico by Bonaparte as royal governor and later execution by the revolutionaries. At age 10, the boy is developing a crush on a mysterious rich girl his age, Bianka, and projects all kinds of virtue behind her apparently surly reserve. An encounter with her at a wax museum display featuring the royal brothers leads him to imagine her as a bastard child of Maximillian by a Mexican mistress and in need of a brave intervention on his part worthy of Victor Hugo. I had lots of fun with this ornate tale whipped up out of the boy’s and Schulz’s fantasies.

The several tales about the obsessions of boy’s father Jakub were the source of my greatest pleasure, almost Thurberesque in their little surprises and charm. His joining the fire brigade hobby leads Jakub to bringing his buddies home to hang out, and much drinking and horseplay ensues. The housekeeper Adela always finds a way to curb Jakub’s excesses, such as driving him to retreat by threatening to tickle him. In the case of his father’s hatching of a diverse collection of bird eggs and turning his attic into a bizarre aviary the boy initially gives his exuberant support. He trips out on the exotic colors and life that the birds bring to their grey lives in fall and winter. But soon his father begins compulsively to mimic his charges, such as flapping his virtual wings and croaking at the dinner table before catching himself in embarrassment. The apparent slippage of his father toward madness gets a reprieve when Adela manages to let the birds escape. Similarly, the son is captivated by his father’s forays into weird philosophy, which is described as an attempt at “the grafting of mesmerism on the body of modern physics.” Although their Jewishness is not much on display, I got the impression of the hazards of dwelling on the Kabbala and myths of golem creation in his goal for “the second generation of creatures that was to stand in open opposition to the present era. …our creations will be provisional as it were, constructed for a single use”. The boy is easily seduced by this riff of his father’s:

<i> “The Demiurge,” said my father, “had no monopoly on creation; creation is a privilege of all spirits. Matter has infinite fecundity, an inexhaustible vital force, and, at the same time, a seductive power of temptation that entices us to create forms. In the depths of matter indistinct smiles take shape, tensions are reinforced, experimental shapes solidify. All matter flows from the infinite possibilities passing through it in faint shivers. All matter flows awaiting the life-giving breath of the spirit, it overflows endlessly within itself, temps with a thousand sweet curves and the softness it hallucinates in its blind imaginings.
There is no dead matter …lifelessness is only one eternal appearance behind which unknown forms of life are hiding.
…
He was fascinated with boundary forms, uncertain and problematic, like the ectoplasm of somnambulists, pseudomatter; the cataleptic emanation of the brain that in certain instances grew out of the mouth of a sleeping person into an entire table and filled an entire room, like a lushly expanding tissue, an astral dough on the border between body and soul.</i>

Delightful nonsense. His father’s mental reach in his conception of reviving the Age of Genius begins to look like Schulz dream behind the stories themselves, as eloquently described in the David Grossman piece mentioned above as “a period of perfect childhood, feral and filled with light, which even if it lasted for only a brief moment in a person’s life would be missed for the rest of his years”. In Jakub’s language:

<i>Here occurs the phenomenon of representation and vicarious life. Some event, perhaps minor and modest with regard to its provenance and its own means, may, when brought close to the eye, reveal in its interior an infinite, radiant perspective thanks to the higher being attempting to express itself and fiercely blazing within it.
And so we will gather those allusions, those earthly approximations, those stations and stages on the roads of our life, like the shards of a shattered mirror. We will gather piece by piece that which is whole and indivisible, our great age, the age of genius of our life.</i>

For even a toddler age the son suspects his father is keeping from his purview a special book, “The Book”, which contains the secrets of “magnificence beyond reckoning.” He finds at one point the remnants of a catalog of fashion, huckster schemes, and miraculous medical schemes and treatments which he believes to be fragments of this book. This frame of view leads him in his decoding efforts to quite a few odd and touching inferences in the form of life lessons and perspectives on the reality run by adults. Thinks turn darker when his father’s horror of cockroaches sends him around the bend. We witness a bit of an alternative to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, where the conversion (once to a cockroach and in another piece into a crab) is rendered from the perspective of the neglectful family instead of an interior view. Quite a masterpiece of comic horror.

His father’s brilliant madness achieves an apotheosis in the story with the catchy title “The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.” The grown-up son visits him there where it seems that one version of his father is thriving and cheating death. The doctor in change explains:
<i>The entire trick depends … on the fact that we have turned back time. …Here, your father’s death, the death that already reached him in your fatherland, has simply not taken effect.</i>

Schulz’s most well-known story, “The Street of Crocodiles,” was not a favorite for me. It’s an extended conception of a large city with a quarter taken over by rampant American-style commercialism and corruption. It appears rather featureless on maps and contains streets somehow devoid of most color (which I didn’t get given as expectation of crass advertising). Those who wander there at first experience a special freedom, but eventually the unreal logic of the place sinks in with a Twilight Zone gothcha:
<i>...the fatal flaw in this quarter is that nothing in it is ever realized, nothing reaches its <u>definitivum</u>, all movements that are initiated are exhausted prematurely and cannot proceed beyond a certain dead end. …The Street of Crocodiles was our city’s concession to modernity and metropolitan depravity.</i>

Over 90% of the collection was outstanding to me, so I urge most readers to give this master a chance to spin your head around. The book was provided for review by the publisher through the Netgalley program.

<img src="https://i1.wp.com/www.nijomu.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/schulz-autoportet-sztokholm-2010_4245581.jpg" width="400" height="315"/>
<I>Self portrait</i>

Collected Stories by Bruno Schulz is a collection of short stories comprised of two published works and additional uncollected stories. Schulz was a Polish Jewish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher. He is regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award.

There are two things that make this collection great. The first is the writing style. Schulz is perhaps the only readily known Polish modernist in the West. It takes only a short time before the reader is drawn into the minds of the characters. The settings gain importance over the concept of plot and are rich in imagery. The imagery is not only found in the great things but also in the mundane like fish in aspic. The characters get the same treatment:

What remained of him was a small amount of corporeal casing and that
handful of senseless eccentricities—they could disappear one day, as unnoticed
as the gray pile of trash collecting in a corner that Adela carried out
every day to the garbage bin.

The second thing that makes this collection significant is the translation work by Madeline G. Levine. Levine is Kenan Professor of Slavic Literatures Emerita at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her translations from Polish include The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories by Hanna Krall, Bread for the Departed by Bogdan Wojdowski, and four volumes of prose by Czesław Miłosz. The introduction documents the checking and rechecking by another party of the translation. The goal is to capture the essence and accuracy of the original language. The proper use of translation, even if sometimes unwieldy in English or using words that are not in common use, like hill-lock hump, adds depth and accuracy to reading and concentrates the reader's effort and attention.

Collected Stories offers the reader a look inside of Polish fiction of the modernist period. There are many similarities in the writing to Woolf's later poetic prose. Stream of consciousness plays out through the stories. As many of the stories take place in the past, the effects of memory play an important role in the storytelling much like in Proust. Talking to an acquaintance who was born and raised in Poland, Schulz is wonderful and read by most in high school. After reading this collection, I would definitely agree with the wonderful.

DNF. A family of four lived in a dark, shaded apartment with wallpaper yellowed from the excessive summer heat. The dimly lit apartment, above their dressmaking business, was in a state of neglect. The father's health deteriorated as he experienced loss of his mental faculties. He conversed with himself, was often agitated and sometimes became glazed over like an automaton. The metaphors, although excellent, were not enough to help maintain my interest level in continuing to read and fairly assess this tome. It would be unfair to rate "Collected Stories" by Bruno Schulz, a book I did not finish.

Thank you Northwestern University press and Net Galley for the opportunity to read and review "Collected Stories".

Collected Stories is one of those collections that keep literary reviewers and prestigious literary journals buzzing with over excitement. Whether it is his collection of ‘Street of Crocodiles’ or the later collection ‘Sanatorium under the Sign of an Hourglass’, Schulz work is very well recognised within the upper brow annuals of literary fiction.

Keeping this mind, I personally tend to find difficulties reading this type of work as it is supposed to be the cream of the crop and held to such a high level that often times, the work does not stand up to the praise. I can safely say that with this collection of stories and the writing of Bruno Schulz, this most definitely lives up to its reputation.

Schulz’s writing style borders on extreme beauty and surrealism and he balances these to create an incredible body of work. The writing style is not short and sweet and he places his structuring, at times long winded, which to the modern novelist reader, can seem a bit out of sync but if you open your mind and let it wash over you, I think you would be presently surprise.

The work is a translation from the original Polish text and at times I often wonder how much of the writing is in the style of Schulz’s writing and how much of it has been flourished with English prose. As I don’t read Polish, I looked at the stories as the way that they are written. Looking at them from this view point, there are time that the descriptive text seems to be over flourished but this really doesn’t take away from the over enjoyment of the stories found within.

Overall, I would not suggest reading these in one go. This collection of stories works best reading it in parts. Read a story, walk away and read something else and you will find that each individual tale will stay ingrained within your subconscious. Your brain will be returning to them time and time again. The writing style will not be for everyone but if you are in love with the written word, there is plenty to feast your mind on. Take a chance and you will not be disappointed.

I remember writing what I imagined to be a brilliant story when I was around 13 years old. It was full of metaphor, artistic language and descriptive language, and I had agonised over every word to make it feel like I had painted a picture with words. I handed that story in for my English homework and when I got it back, the teacher had written 'too much purple prose' on it. And that was it. That was all the feedback I received for my hours of work. I was stunned. I still have that short story, and reading it now, I can see how awful, pretentious and flowery it actually was. I relay this little anecdote because it is all I could think of when reading these collected short writings. Too much purple prose.

Everyone should read Bruno Schulz, if only to remind themselves that a true master of the short-story form has been around for so long. These stories are devastating.

"Duplicate streets, doppelganger streets, lying and deceptive streets, so to speak, reveal themselves in the depths of the city."
from The Cinnamon Shops

Fans of China Mieville's The City and The City (I'm not one! - see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1809136762) will recognise that quote, in a slightly different translation by John Curran Davis, as the epigraph and perhaps the inspiration of that novel.

And Mieville joins a long list of authors with an acknowledged debt to Bruno Schulz in their work, borrowing quotations, characters, aspects of his life (in addition to the undoubted many on whom his influence is less explicitly noted) such as:

- 2017 MBI winning David Grossman - whose See Under: Love is based around the story of Schulz's death (under the protection of one Gestapo officer in occupied Poland, he was shot in the street by a rival officer), except in his novel the narrator helps him escape his fate by turning him into a salmom

- the legendary Roberto Bolaño: the narrator of his Distant Star reads Schulz's work during the story

- Booker of Booker winning Salman Rushdie, whose Moor's Last Sigh recreates Schulz's Street of Crocodiles but in Andalucia:

"I felt as if I were in some sort of interregnum, in some timeless zone under the sign of an hourglass in which the sand stood motionless, or a clepsydra whose quicksilver had ceased to flow. […] I wandered down sausage-festooned streets of bakeries and cinnamon shops, smelling, instead, the sweet scents of meat and pastries and fresh-baked bread, and surrendered myself to the cryptic laws of the town."
(Rushdie: The Moor's Last Sigh)

- Danilo Kiš whose "family trilogy" owes a large debt to Schulz (“Schulz is my God” he told John Updike): e.g. the title of the last of the trilogy Hourglass rather echoes Schulz's Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass and his Treatise on the Potato therein Schulz' Treatise on Tailors' Dummies

- Jonathan Safran Foer whose Tree of Codes is formed from cutting up his favourite book of all - Schulz's Street of Crocodiles (the words Tree of Codes can be made from a subset of the letters in Street of Crocodiles)

as well as others such as Cynthia Ozick (The Messiah of Stockholm), Philip Roth (the Czech author in The Prague Orgy is essentially Schulz) and Nicole Krauss (The History of Love).

(see http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/06/appropriations-of-bruno-schulz/ for a more detailed survey)

Several of those books are based on the legend of Schulz's lost work, The Messiah, a work some scholars believe perhaps never existed. But what we have hear is the work that Schulz did complete in his brief lifetime - the two story collections The Cinnamon Streets & Other Stories (the original English language publisher chose to present it under the title of another story, The Street of Crocodiles, against the translator's wishes) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, as well as some miscellania.

The lazy reviewers guide to Bruno Schulz would be Witold Gombrowicz meets Franz Kafka, and it is not hard to apparently see the influence of the latter, particularly in The Cinnamon Shops collection:

Many of the stories concern his increasingly eccentric father, who first develops a mania for birds which starts with collecting and incubating rare eggs, but ends with him taking on avian-like characteristics himself, then becomes obsessed with cockroaches, again starting to resemble one himself ("my father was turning into a cockroach"). Querying his father's absence, the narrator asks his mother whether his father is now one of the cockroaches in the house, or perhaps instead the stuffed condor, the last remnant of his avian obsession, although his mother retorts: "I already told you that father is travelling about the country as a travelling salesman."

Or in the labyrinth corridors of the family home, rooms that disappear or come literally alive, and also the confusion of the city's streets (see the opening quotes) or houses:

"Having entered the wrong vestibule and the wrong stairwell, one usually wound up in a veritable labyrinth of unfamiliar apartments and passageways, unexpected exits into unfamiliar courtyards, and one forgot the original goal of the expedition, until, many days later, while returning on some grey dawn from the uncharted territories of strange, matted adventures, one remembered amid pangs of conscience one's family home."

But to spoil the story, while Schulz was to translate Kafka into Polish, he apparently only read Kafka after he was sent a copy to review following the publication of The Cinnamon Shops. One can instead perhaps, equally lazily, suggest they drew on the same (post) Austro-Hungarian empire world of bureaucracy breaking down and mitteleuropean melancholia.

The reality is that Schulz has a surreal style all of his own - one that I can admire sometimes more than appreciate. The narrator's of Distant Star (see above) sums the effect up well: “The words went scuttling past like beetles, busy at incomprehensible tasks.”

I read Schulz's works in 2004, and again a few years later. The reason for revisiting them now is the publication of a new translation by Madeline Levine, the original works having been brought into English in the 1960-1970s by Celina Wieniewska.

I'm not, as a rule, a massive fan of retranslations of classic works. There is far too much great but untranslated literature that would better command an enthusiastic translator's attention, and much retranslation does seem to be nitpicking with the original - the occasional case where the original was badly flawed tends to be the exception rather than the rule.

Here I was pleased to see that Levine praises the 'undeniable magic of Wieniewska's English version.' She justifies retranslation generally on the grounds that "the richer the original, the more interpretations it can sustain. Translation is both a scholarly art and a performance,' which is fair enough but still leaves my concern with efficient use of translation resources.

Specifically, she argues that while her predecessor 'intended to convey the visual images and bizarre events that distinguish Schulz's stories,' she did this by 'taming his prose.' Levine's aim is to 'get closer to the texture of Schulz's prose by stretching English syntax to make it accommodate the sinousity of Schulz's longer sentences rather than reigning them in,' and also to closer mirror Schulz's repetition and alliteration and the use, as much as possible, of the prefix dis- (mirroring an equivalent Polish term).

I must admit I struggled, comparing the translations side by side, to detect such a significant difference, other perhaps than Levine drawing on a richer English vocabulary. Compare for example the literally labyrinthine sentence above to Wieniewska's version.

"For, once you had entered the wrong doorway and set foot on the wrong staircase, you were liable to find oneself in a real labyrinth of unfamiliar apartments and balconies, and unexpected doors opening onto strange empty courtyards, and you forgot the initial object of the expedition, only to recall it days later after numerous strange and complicated adventures, on regaining the family home in the grey light of dawn."

(See this for a further discussion: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2017/09/20/the-good-bad-translator-celina-wieniewska-and-her-bruno-schulz/)

So overall Schulz is an author one ought to read if only for his profound influence on others. This translation will likely become the new standard, and for someone new to Schulz would be the right starting place. But I wouldn't recommend it as a vital choice over the existing one which remains fit for purpose.