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.
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The Street of Crocodiles
By Bruno Schulz
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.
Popular Reviews(1)
Reviewed by VerenaWhaaaaat did i even read?! This book is unlike anything I’ve read before. It feels less like a novel and more like wandering through a dream where memories and imagination blur together. The surreal imagery can be disorienting, but the prose is absolutely breathtaking. Even when I wasn’t sure where the story was taking me, I wanted to keep reading simply because the writing was so beautiful. For me, this was a book I admired more than I loved. It didn’t fully connect with me emotionally, but I deeply appreciated its originality and extraordinary use of language. -> There was something tragic in that immoderate fertility; the misery of a creature fighting on the borders of nothingness and death, the heroism of womanhood triumphing by fertility over the shortcomings of nature, over the insufficiency of the male. -> […] a rich but empty and colorless vegetation of pretentious vulgarity. -> […] the geometry of emptiness, into the timbers of a void. -> Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character. -> […] the month of August had chosen to hold that year its pagan orgies. -> There the untidy, feminine ripeness of August had expanded into enormous, impenetrable clumps of burdocks spreading their sheets of leafy tin, their luxuriant tongues of fleshy greenery. -> A tangled thicket of grasses, weeds, and thistles crackled in the fire of the afternoon. The sleeping garden was resonant with flies. The golden field of stubble shouted in the sun like a tawny cloud of locusts; in the thick rain of fire the crickets screamed; seed pods exploded softly like grasshoppers.