The Street of CrocodilesThe 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. |
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LibraryThing Review
User Review - asxz - LibraryThingWeird and probably wonderful. The translation was so overstuffed with adjectives that it felt overwritten although the original intention may well have been a heightened and overwrought reality. Denser and harder to read than I had anticipated, this was unsettling but not in a creepy way. Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - jonfaith - LibraryThingThis less anovel than a collection of oddities, a freakish notebook of squirming detail. There was an association to be made between Schulz's "father" in the novel and the Father in Kafka's The Judgement. Read full review
Contents
August | 25 |
Visitation | 36 |
Birds | 45 |
Tailors Dummies | 51 |
Treatise on Tailors Dummies or The Second Book of Genesis | 59 |
Continuation | 63 |
Conclusion | 66 |
Nimrod | 72 |
Mr Charles | 81 |
Cinnamon Shops | 85 |
The Street of Crocodiles | 99 |
Cockroaches | 111 |
The Gale | 117 |
The Night of the Great Season | 125 |
The Comet | 139 |
Pan | 77 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Adela anger attic Aunt Agatha Austro-Hungarian empire autumn barrel organ became began birds blind bowler hats breath bright Bruno Schulz chimney cinnamon shops cockroaches colored complicated corner cracks crowd curtains dark dawn delicate Demiurge depths distant door dreams Drogobych Dummies dusk empty enormous eyes face fantastic father felt Ficowski filled the room finger floor gale gestures girls gray grew Gruyère cheese hands head houses Jerzy Ficowski kitchen lamp lifted light looked Market Square morning mother nightly Nimrod oakum pale papier-mâché pelmet Poland Polda Queen Draga roofs rose rustle secret seemed shadows shelves shimmering shiny shofar shop assistants silence sleep slowly smell smile sometimes spread steps stood stop strange Street of Crocodiles suddenly swelled thick tion Treatise on Tailors Uncle Edward walked wall wandering whole wind window wings winter nights
Popular passages
Page 18 - in a run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which—like a sixth, smallest toe—grow a thirteenth freak month.
Page 18 - The Messiah, in which the myth of the coming of the Messiah would symbolize a return to the happy perfection that existed at the beginningin Schulzian terms, the return to childhood.
Page 18 - Schulzian time-his mythic time—obedient and submissive to man, offers artistic recompense for the profaned time of everyday life, which relentlessly subordinates all things to itself and carries events and people off in a current of evanescence. Schulz introduces a subjective, psychological time and then gives it substance, objectivity, by subjecting the course of occurrences to its laws.
References to this book
Bibliographic information
| Title | The Street of Crocodiles A Penguin Book: Fiction Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin Series Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics Writers from the other Europe |
| Author | Bruno Schulz |
| Translated by | Celina Wieniewska |
| Edition | reprint, reissue |
| Publisher | Penguin, 1977 |
| ISBN | 0140186255, 9780140186253 |
| Length | 160 pages |
| Subjects | › Fiction / Classics Fiction / General Fiction / Literary |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |