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One of the most inscrutable collections of writing you'll ever likely come across, as likely to terrify and beguile you with Expressionist overtones, as it is to leave you cold and frustrated with its labyrinthine language.
Tussen het dwarrelen van mijn gedachten door, hebben Schulz' woorden en prachtige zinnen me kunnen verleiden. Met name 'de Kaneelwinkels' nodigt uit tot herlezen, waardoor het aantal sterren van deze recensie zeker nog kan oplopen.
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Bruno Schulz certainly knows how to write weird stuff. This is 3⭐️ not because of his ideas, language, or structure, but because I really just didn’t like it. I felt like a very, very confused literature student who didn’t understand the assigned reading at all, and I think I’m beyond that point in my reading career and want to read things that are at least based in sense when it’s for my own enjoyment lol
A few likable stories for me included “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” and “Father’s Last Escape”
A few likable stories for me included “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” and “Father’s Last Escape”
od liceum pierwszy, ale nie ostatni powrót do tej książki, bo mam wrażenie, że tak jak tym razem rozjaśniło mi się więcej tak wciąż dużo mnie ominęło.
4.75
This is like nothing I’ve read before. Take [a:Franz Kafka|5223|Franz Kafka|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1495464914p2/5223.jpg], [a:Marcel Proust|233619|Marcel Proust|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1392271688p2/233619.jpg] and [a:Jorge Luis Borges|500|Jorge Luis Borges|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1537559279p2/500.jpg]; shake them up; rearrange the splinters into a collage of expressionism; and still this is like nothing I’ve read before.
A father becomes a cockroach, a large bird, a crustacean; an aunt burns in a fit of anger into a pile of ashes. The young narrator remembers a book, the Book of all Books, from when he was even younger and despairs at his family’s cavalier attitude when he discovers its fate. A postage-stamp album is the entryway into a life of love, war, jealousy, and sacrifice. Death exists at the same time it is delayed. Mirrors don’t merely reflect: They hint at the other worlds they contain. Old men soar above the ground as if they are in a Chagall painting.
The stories do not stop when the characters fall asleep, only to pick up again when they awake. Instead, the rooms of the house expand; the walls, curtains, and furniture pulsate; the minds of the sleepers reach out to one another or across the city, except when they don’t. In many cases the active sleeping is the eventful climax of a story.
Above all, it is the language that delights. Within an elegant structure of sentences, the imagery invokes all the senses so plentifully that every yellow horizon, every crack between buildings, every single thing, is alive.
To quote the old-age pensioner:
This is like nothing I’ve read before. Take [a:Franz Kafka|5223|Franz Kafka|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1495464914p2/5223.jpg], [a:Marcel Proust|233619|Marcel Proust|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1392271688p2/233619.jpg] and [a:Jorge Luis Borges|500|Jorge Luis Borges|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1537559279p2/500.jpg]; shake them up; rearrange the splinters into a collage of expressionism; and still this is like nothing I’ve read before.
A father becomes a cockroach, a large bird, a crustacean; an aunt burns in a fit of anger into a pile of ashes. The young narrator remembers a book, the Book of all Books, from when he was even younger and despairs at his family’s cavalier attitude when he discovers its fate. A postage-stamp album is the entryway into a life of love, war, jealousy, and sacrifice. Death exists at the same time it is delayed. Mirrors don’t merely reflect: They hint at the other worlds they contain. Old men soar above the ground as if they are in a Chagall painting.
The stories do not stop when the characters fall asleep, only to pick up again when they awake. Instead, the rooms of the house expand; the walls, curtains, and furniture pulsate; the minds of the sleepers reach out to one another or across the city, except when they don’t. In many cases the active sleeping is the eventful climax of a story.
Above all, it is the language that delights. Within an elegant structure of sentences, the imagery invokes all the senses so plentifully that every yellow horizon, every crack between buildings, every single thing, is alive.
To quote the old-age pensioner:
It is part of my existence to be the parasite of metaphors, so easily am I carried away by the first simile that comes along. Having been carried away, I have to find my difficult way back, and slowly return to my senses.Always with full use of his senses, Schulz may at times drop the similes, but never the metaphors.
Review composed of A Chorus of Voices
1.00 March 3rd 2016 — voice of The Reviewer
As I was reading through this book, a great many thoughts and impressions formed in my mind, and there they have lain since, each waiting for a chance to push itself into a prime position in this review space. So, for the moment, I'm just sitting on them, frantically trying to hold them down as I think how to shape them in a way that will be vaguely comprehensible to someone who hasn't read this book or doesn't live inside my head.
But the task will certainly involve excluding some of those many impressions, and I can sense already that I'll have a rebellion on my hands as stray thoughts I had discarded steal into the review while I'm asleep. I will have to be very vigilant, perhaps enter into some kind of contract with the review space so that it will refuse entry to thoughts that don't carry a pass signed by me personally.
I'll be watching this space.
................................................................
3.30 March 3rd — voices of The Reviewer's Stray Thoughts
We are the tandeta, the reviewer's stray thoughts, and though we have no clothes as yet, we are determined to camp in this review space. Bruno Schulz himself has given us permission and we defy anyone to remove us.
...............................................................
13.00 March 4th — voice of The Reviewer
I had to look up the word 'tandeta' which has just appeared in the review space (see above and comment #4), and I discovered that it is an almost untranslatable Polish word which Schulz uses regularly, a word that means variously: 'trash', 'shoddy', 'cast-off'. It also means the kind of market where such second-rate goods can be found, a flea-market, for example.
And now I see that the group of decrepit military wax-figures which the narrator frees from a wax museum in the story called 'Spring', and which you can see in the Bruno Schulz drawing above, are declaring themselves in support of the stray thoughts I had decided weren't fit for purpose.
I had marshaled what I thought of as the more worthy thoughts into a coherent paragraph earlier this morning and was quite pleased with the result. Now I'm not so sure—but I refuse to be intimidated by a bunch of moth-eaten ex-generals so I'll post the paragraph anyway:
Schulz is a magician. From the blank interior of his top-hat, he pulls streams and streams of multi-hued words, words that separate and reform into pink doves, blue buzzards, red storks, yellow pelicans, each with long ribbons of syllables dangling from their beaks. And when the ribbons break off, they float away on the breeze, looping and dipping in arabesques across a papery sky, spelling out stories, one stranger than the next, stories for then, stories for now, stories for ever...
...........................................................
15.00 March 5th — voices of The Reviewer's Stray Thoughts
We feel the Reviewer is unfairly relegating the concept of ‘tandeta’ which is central to Schulz’s stories. His narrator shines a bright light on things the world generally considers as only fit for the rubbish heap.
One story, for example, focuses on an old almanac the narrator loved to look through as a child and which he later comes across when most of its pages have been torn out to serve some domestic purpose, perhaps to light the fire in the stove. He endows the ragged remains of this old catalogue of ancient dates and obsolete advertisements with the properties of every book that ever existed. It becomes 'The Book of Books'. And so we realise that from ‘tandeta’ or rubbish, the narrator believes something truly beautiful can be created.
This experience is repeated again and again throughout the stories as the things people generally seek to discard become instead things of beauty. A faded curtain stiff with dust, dead flies on a windowpane, moss covered paths, old tree roots, such things are constantly celebrated.
Bruno Schulz writes 'Under The Sign of the Rubbish Heap'.
..............................................................
15.55 March 5th — voice of The Penguin Classics Edition
Since it seems that anything can happen on this review page, the book itself surely has a right to speak. Yes, this edition of Bruno Schulz’s collected stories is claiming space to announce that what the reader gets inside the covers of this book is nothing less than magical: thirty stories and novellas plus thirty illustrations by Schulz himself.
The stories are drawn from the two collections published in the author’s lifetime, 'Cinnamon Shops' from 1933
and 'Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass',
from 1937 (though written earlier than the stories in Cinnamon Shops) plus a few other stories that had appeared in periodicals and journals around that time.
Not all of the stories are illustrated but where they occur, the fantastical nature of the drawings complements the hallucinatory narratives perfectly, introducing a further layer of eccentricity to the work. However, even when there are no illustrations, the words cast surreal images onto the screen of the reader’s mind:
Father was listening. In the silence of the night his ear seemed to grow larger and to reach out beyond the window: a fantastic coral, a red polypus watching the chaos of the night.
The translation in this edition was done by Celina Wieniewska, and the rich and exciting language of the stories is the proof of the success of her work, which was not an easy task as David A. Goldfarb points out in the introduction. According to Goldfarb, Bruno Schulz uses a number of words that are so obscure even in Polish that Wieniewska was obliged to be very creative in order to render them in English. This Penguin Classics edition, standing in for the author who would certainly have been exceedingly grateful to her, bows before Wieniewska’s talent and would kiss her feet.
..........................................................
20.50 March 5th — voices of The Reviewer's Stray Thoughts
The peacock-feather eye peeping through the keyhole, the pattern on wallpaper shifting to echo the father’s frowns, the squares of a parquet floor endlessly counting themselves in horizontal creaks and vertical cracks, chimney smoke weaving to avoid the wind, lamps with arms akimbo, mirrors that appear elderly—everything in a Schulz story, even the shadow on the wall, is personified, so that the reader should not be at all surprised when the book the stories inhabit itself speaks aloud as it has done above.
Have you ever noticed swallows rising in flocks from between the lines of certain books? One should read the flight of these birds..
..........................................................
2.00 am March 6th — voices of The Review-Edit Box
How many services we provide, we, the humble Edit-Boxes of this Goodreads world! We offer a luminous space where a winking curser waits patiently to receive the reviewer's words, words which may be written in a thousand different ways depending on the reviewer in question, sometimes baldly, sometimes boldly, sometimes in hints and ellipses, dashes and dots. The gaps in comprehension that result have to be filled by the vague guesses and suppositions of review readers, and we always offer our sympathy for the predicament they find themselves in, especially if they feel called upon to comment after reading.
At other times we, the review boxes, are packed tight with dense blocks of text, and not a paragraph break occurs to offer a breathing space. Our sighs are then as audible as the readers’ who attempt to decipher the text, bless their dedicated souls. Please let some air in, we entreat them, and when occasionally an obliging reader selects a phrase, a sentence, or on a good day, an entire paragraph, to copy into a comment box, how we cheer and applaud! It relieves the tedium.
When we're very bored we call in Madame Autocorrect and let her loose on the text. Afterwords we sit patiently like spiders in a web, waiting for an unsuspecting reader to come along, and when they do, we roll about laughing as they scroll back and forth scanning the autocorrected words in a state of the greatest perplexity. Such fun—especially if the referees are posturing from a ballsy scream and can't feck back easily to see how the next has appalled.
Our favourite reviewers are those who use html to vary our presentation by means of italics, spoilers, links and images. Imagine the sport as we take bets on which links will refuse to work and which images will fail in the days that follow. The truth is, it's very easy to interfere with html code; if we breathe out in a vigorous way, a vital element can fly off like a button from an overcoat. That can be an amusing exercise.
Needless to add, our favourite readers are those who pause to press the Like button with a good firm touch (no light, tickly ones, please). Then, the utter thrill—there is nothing to compare with it!
........................................................
12.12 March 6th — voices of The End of the Review Committee
Speaking in our capacity as members of the final section of this review, we have voted to set it in place here and now, and to block any further delays and prevarications in the finalisation of this review. Three days is more than enough time for a review to be ‘ongoing’; there is a limit to everything.
And while we are aware that certain topics have not been covered or only very sketchily, we don’t support the idea that any review should ever seek to be totally comprehensive. The shorter the better is our motto, especially as such a policy allows 'The End of the Review' to be reached more speedily.
As to the length of 'The End of the Review', we are more flexible on that point since everyone agrees that 'the ending' is the most important part of any piece of writing.
We deem it relevant to note here also that this particular review is more playful than we might like, a fact we tolerate in this case because it underlines that Bruno Schulz tells most of his stories from the point of view of a child with a very vivid imagination and a very extravagant taste in metaphor, at least in our opinion.
As in this review, Schulz’s stories are filled with distortions of time and space, both being given life and agency over their surroundings, something we are also less than comfortable with, let it be noted. The result of such manipulation is a certain warped effect, as if viewing an event through the glass of a very old window where sometimes the view is completley clear and at other times completely fuzzy, not an ideal outcome in our considered opinion.
Furthermore, as in the sections of this review which, in spite of their differences in style and tone, are nevertheless part of a whole, Schulz’s stories share characters and locations so that instead of reading as individual pieces, they rather build into one long novel, a fact which may offer satisfaction to the reader who prefers novels to short stories.
Knowing that Schulz was born quite a few years after his brother and sister, and when his father had begun to grow old, encourages us to postulate that these stories contain many autobiographical elements since they mostly feature an elderly father and his young son. The mother and a servant called Adela also roam from story to story and provide some entertainment, Adela in particular, who, with her broom constantly to hand, sweeps away entire heaps of ‘tandeta’ whenever she gets the chance, something we would have enjoyed doing in this review had we but a broom.
We quite liked Adela.
1.00 March 3rd 2016 — voice of The Reviewer
As I was reading through this book, a great many thoughts and impressions formed in my mind, and there they have lain since, each waiting for a chance to push itself into a prime position in this review space. So, for the moment, I'm just sitting on them, frantically trying to hold them down as I think how to shape them in a way that will be vaguely comprehensible to someone who hasn't read this book or doesn't live inside my head.
But the task will certainly involve excluding some of those many impressions, and I can sense already that I'll have a rebellion on my hands as stray thoughts I had discarded steal into the review while I'm asleep. I will have to be very vigilant, perhaps enter into some kind of contract with the review space so that it will refuse entry to thoughts that don't carry a pass signed by me personally.
I'll be watching this space.
................................................................
3.30 March 3rd — voices of The Reviewer's Stray Thoughts
We are the tandeta, the reviewer's stray thoughts, and though we have no clothes as yet, we are determined to camp in this review space. Bruno Schulz himself has given us permission and we defy anyone to remove us.
...............................................................
13.00 March 4th — voice of The Reviewer
I had to look up the word 'tandeta' which has just appeared in the review space (see above and comment #4), and I discovered that it is an almost untranslatable Polish word which Schulz uses regularly, a word that means variously: 'trash', 'shoddy', 'cast-off'. It also means the kind of market where such second-rate goods can be found, a flea-market, for example.
And now I see that the group of decrepit military wax-figures which the narrator frees from a wax museum in the story called 'Spring', and which you can see in the Bruno Schulz drawing above, are declaring themselves in support of the stray thoughts I had decided weren't fit for purpose.
I had marshaled what I thought of as the more worthy thoughts into a coherent paragraph earlier this morning and was quite pleased with the result. Now I'm not so sure—but I refuse to be intimidated by a bunch of moth-eaten ex-generals so I'll post the paragraph anyway:
Schulz is a magician. From the blank interior of his top-hat, he pulls streams and streams of multi-hued words, words that separate and reform into pink doves, blue buzzards, red storks, yellow pelicans, each with long ribbons of syllables dangling from their beaks. And when the ribbons break off, they float away on the breeze, looping and dipping in arabesques across a papery sky, spelling out stories, one stranger than the next, stories for then, stories for now, stories for ever...
...........................................................
15.00 March 5th — voices of The Reviewer's Stray Thoughts
We feel the Reviewer is unfairly relegating the concept of ‘tandeta’ which is central to Schulz’s stories. His narrator shines a bright light on things the world generally considers as only fit for the rubbish heap.
One story, for example, focuses on an old almanac the narrator loved to look through as a child and which he later comes across when most of its pages have been torn out to serve some domestic purpose, perhaps to light the fire in the stove. He endows the ragged remains of this old catalogue of ancient dates and obsolete advertisements with the properties of every book that ever existed. It becomes 'The Book of Books'. And so we realise that from ‘tandeta’ or rubbish, the narrator believes something truly beautiful can be created.
This experience is repeated again and again throughout the stories as the things people generally seek to discard become instead things of beauty. A faded curtain stiff with dust, dead flies on a windowpane, moss covered paths, old tree roots, such things are constantly celebrated.
Bruno Schulz writes 'Under The Sign of the Rubbish Heap'.
..............................................................
15.55 March 5th — voice of The Penguin Classics Edition
Since it seems that anything can happen on this review page, the book itself surely has a right to speak. Yes, this edition of Bruno Schulz’s collected stories is claiming space to announce that what the reader gets inside the covers of this book is nothing less than magical: thirty stories and novellas plus thirty illustrations by Schulz himself.
The stories are drawn from the two collections published in the author’s lifetime, 'Cinnamon Shops' from 1933
and 'Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass',
from 1937 (though written earlier than the stories in Cinnamon Shops) plus a few other stories that had appeared in periodicals and journals around that time.
Not all of the stories are illustrated but where they occur, the fantastical nature of the drawings complements the hallucinatory narratives perfectly, introducing a further layer of eccentricity to the work. However, even when there are no illustrations, the words cast surreal images onto the screen of the reader’s mind:
Father was listening. In the silence of the night his ear seemed to grow larger and to reach out beyond the window: a fantastic coral, a red polypus watching the chaos of the night.
The translation in this edition was done by Celina Wieniewska, and the rich and exciting language of the stories is the proof of the success of her work, which was not an easy task as David A. Goldfarb points out in the introduction. According to Goldfarb, Bruno Schulz uses a number of words that are so obscure even in Polish that Wieniewska was obliged to be very creative in order to render them in English. This Penguin Classics edition, standing in for the author who would certainly have been exceedingly grateful to her, bows before Wieniewska’s talent and would kiss her feet.
..........................................................
20.50 March 5th — voices of The Reviewer's Stray Thoughts
The peacock-feather eye peeping through the keyhole, the pattern on wallpaper shifting to echo the father’s frowns, the squares of a parquet floor endlessly counting themselves in horizontal creaks and vertical cracks, chimney smoke weaving to avoid the wind, lamps with arms akimbo, mirrors that appear elderly—everything in a Schulz story, even the shadow on the wall, is personified, so that the reader should not be at all surprised when the book the stories inhabit itself speaks aloud as it has done above.
Have you ever noticed swallows rising in flocks from between the lines of certain books? One should read the flight of these birds..
..........................................................
2.00 am March 6th — voices of The Review-Edit Box
How many services we provide, we, the humble Edit-Boxes of this Goodreads world! We offer a luminous space where a winking curser waits patiently to receive the reviewer's words, words which may be written in a thousand different ways depending on the reviewer in question, sometimes baldly, sometimes boldly, sometimes in hints and ellipses, dashes and dots. The gaps in comprehension that result have to be filled by the vague guesses and suppositions of review readers, and we always offer our sympathy for the predicament they find themselves in, especially if they feel called upon to comment after reading.
At other times we, the review boxes, are packed tight with dense blocks of text, and not a paragraph break occurs to offer a breathing space. Our sighs are then as audible as the readers’ who attempt to decipher the text, bless their dedicated souls. Please let some air in, we entreat them, and when occasionally an obliging reader selects a phrase, a sentence, or on a good day, an entire paragraph, to copy into a comment box, how we cheer and applaud! It relieves the tedium.
When we're very bored we call in Madame Autocorrect and let her loose on the text. Afterwords we sit patiently like spiders in a web, waiting for an unsuspecting reader to come along, and when they do, we roll about laughing as they scroll back and forth scanning the autocorrected words in a state of the greatest perplexity. Such fun—especially if the referees are posturing from a ballsy scream and can't feck back easily to see how the next has appalled.
Our favourite reviewers are those who use html to vary our presentation by means of italics, spoilers, links and images. Imagine the sport as we take bets on which links will refuse to work and which images will fail in the days that follow. The truth is, it's very easy to interfere with html code; if we breathe out in a vigorous way, a vital element can fly off like a button from an overcoat. That can be an amusing exercise.
Needless to add, our favourite readers are those who pause to press the Like button with a good firm touch (no light, tickly ones, please). Then, the utter thrill—there is nothing to compare with it!
........................................................
12.12 March 6th — voices of The End of the Review Committee
Speaking in our capacity as members of the final section of this review, we have voted to set it in place here and now, and to block any further delays and prevarications in the finalisation of this review. Three days is more than enough time for a review to be ‘ongoing’; there is a limit to everything.
And while we are aware that certain topics have not been covered or only very sketchily, we don’t support the idea that any review should ever seek to be totally comprehensive. The shorter the better is our motto, especially as such a policy allows 'The End of the Review' to be reached more speedily.
As to the length of 'The End of the Review', we are more flexible on that point since everyone agrees that 'the ending' is the most important part of any piece of writing.
We deem it relevant to note here also that this particular review is more playful than we might like, a fact we tolerate in this case because it underlines that Bruno Schulz tells most of his stories from the point of view of a child with a very vivid imagination and a very extravagant taste in metaphor, at least in our opinion.
As in this review, Schulz’s stories are filled with distortions of time and space, both being given life and agency over their surroundings, something we are also less than comfortable with, let it be noted. The result of such manipulation is a certain warped effect, as if viewing an event through the glass of a very old window where sometimes the view is completley clear and at other times completely fuzzy, not an ideal outcome in our considered opinion.
Furthermore, as in the sections of this review which, in spite of their differences in style and tone, are nevertheless part of a whole, Schulz’s stories share characters and locations so that instead of reading as individual pieces, they rather build into one long novel, a fact which may offer satisfaction to the reader who prefers novels to short stories.
Knowing that Schulz was born quite a few years after his brother and sister, and when his father had begun to grow old, encourages us to postulate that these stories contain many autobiographical elements since they mostly feature an elderly father and his young son. The mother and a servant called Adela also roam from story to story and provide some entertainment, Adela in particular, who, with her broom constantly to hand, sweeps away entire heaps of ‘tandeta’ whenever she gets the chance, something we would have enjoyed doing in this review had we but a broom.
We quite liked Adela.
оповідання Шульца дуже і дуже химерні. Та разом з тим, я сказав би, що це - автобіографія. Розповідь про себе, свій родовід з іншого боку - духовного.
химерний і грайливий світ, який з'явився на ґрунті галицького Дрогобича. оповідання не є прості для читання, але дуже красиві. поетичне відчуття Андруховича м’якості, гнучкості, темпу письма Шульца дуже і дуже.
дивні історії садів, будинків, людей, що губляться в несподівано різко деформованому довкіллі чи перетворюються на комах, світ дитини очима дорослого. все це можна знайти там.
легко читається людям, що можуть швиденько викликати світлини в голові, встигаюяи за текстом Шульца
химерний і грайливий світ, який з'явився на ґрунті галицького Дрогобича. оповідання не є прості для читання, але дуже красиві. поетичне відчуття Андруховича м’якості, гнучкості, темпу письма Шульца дуже і дуже.
дивні історії садів, будинків, людей, що губляться в несподівано різко деформованому довкіллі чи перетворюються на комах, світ дитини очима дорослого. все це можна знайти там.
легко читається людям, що можуть швиденько викликати світлини в голові, встигаюяи за текстом Шульца
challenging
emotional
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated