Where to Start with Bruno Schulz
Bruno Schulz published two slim books of stories, taught drawing at a school in provincial Poland, and was shot dead by a Gestapo officer in the street in 1942. From that slender life came some of the most extraordinary prose of the twentieth century: stories in which a father transforms into a crab, a room fills with exotic birds, and an entire street dissolves into the texture of a dream. His writing is closer to painting than to conventional fiction, each sentence a brushstroke of color and metamorphosis. Kafka is the inevitable comparison, but Schulz is warmer, stranger, and more ecstatic.
Start here
The Street of Crocodiles
Bruno Schulz · 160 pages · 1934 · Moderate
Themes: metamorphosis, childhood, imagination, provincial life, the father
A boy in a provincial Polish town watches his father dissolve into madness and metamorphosis, while the town itself shifts between the mundane and the mythic. Schulz’s first collection is one of the most original works of fiction in any language: half memoir, half hallucination, entirely unforgettable.
Why Start Here
The Street of Crocodiles (originally published as Cinnamon Shops) is Schulz’s masterpiece and one of the great short story collections of the twentieth century. The stories circle obsessively around a small cast: the narrator’s father (who breeds exotic birds, transforms into a crab, and opens a shop of impossible fabrics), the family servant Adela, and the provincial town of Drohobycz, which Schulz reimagines as a place where reality is always on the verge of dissolving into something richer and stranger.
The prose is unlike anything else: dense, sensory, incandescent. Schulz writes about wallpaper, dust, and weather as though they contain the secrets of the universe, and in his hands they do. Cynthia Ozick called him a “mythologizer of the ordinary,” and Philip Roth championed his work for decades. The Penguin edition includes a foreword by Jonathan Safran Foer.
What to Expect
Short, densely written stories that reward slow reading. The prose is poetic and the imagery surreal. Some stories are linked, others stand alone. The emotional register runs from comic to elegiac. Best read a story or two at a time.