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The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories (Penguin Classics) Paperback – March 25, 2008

by Bruno Schulz (Author), Celina Wieniewska (Translator), David Goldfarb (Introduction),
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 140 ratings
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The collected fiction of "one of the most original imaginations in modern Europe" (Cynthia Ozick)

Bruno Schulz's untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Illustrated with Schulz's original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and influential writers. 

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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  1. Print length
    368 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Penguin Classics
  4. Publication date
    March 25, 2008
  5. Dimensions
    5.05 x 0.61 x 7.67 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0143105140
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0143105145
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“[Schulz’s] very beautiful, sensitive, meaningful stories raised the Polish language to a completely different level. I love him but I also hate him because there’s no way to compete with him. He’s the genius of the Polish language.” —Olga Tokarczuk, The Guardian

“Every time I open his books, I’m amazed anew to discover how this writer, a single human being who rarely left his home town, created for us an entire world, an alternate dimension of reality. . . . His [stories] create a fantastic universe, a private mythology of one family, and are written in a language that brims with life, a language that is itself the main character of the stories and is the only dimension in which they could possibly exist. . . . On every page, life [is] raging, exploding with vitality, suddenly worthy of its name.” —David Grossman, The New Yorker 

“Bruno Schulz’s slim output of stories were all he needed to publish in his lifetime to earn his place alongside other 20th-century giants like Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges.” —Sjón, Vulture

“A masterpiece of comic writing; grave yet dignified, domestically plain yet poetic, exultant and forgiving, marvelously inventive, shy, and never raw.” —The New York Review of Books 

“Bruno Schulz was one of the great writers, one of the great transmogrifiers of the world into words. . . . [His] verbal art strikes us—stuns us, even—with its overload of beauty.” —John Updike

“One of the most original imaginations in modern Europe.” —Cynthia Ozick

“Schulz cannot be easily classified. He can be called a surrealist, a symbolist, an expressionist, a modernist. . . . He wrote sometimes like Kafka, sometimes like Proust, and at times succeeded in reaching depths that neither of them reached. . . . If Schulz had been allowed to live out his life, he might have given us untold treasures, but what he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.” —Isaac Bashevis Singer 

“Rich in fantasy, sensuous in their apprehension of the living world, elegant in style, witty, underpinned by a mystical but coherent idealistic aesthetic, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass were unique and startling productions, seeming to come out of nowhere. . . . Schulz was incomparably gifted as an explorer of his own inner life, which is at the same time the recollected inner life of his childhood and his own creative workings. From the first comes the charm and freshness of his stories, from the second their intellectual power.” —J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books

About the Author

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.

Celina Wieniewska (translator) was awarded the 1963 Roy Publishers Polish-into-English prize for her translation of The Street of Crocodiles.
 
Jonathan Safran Foer (foreword)is the bestselling author of the novels Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Here I Am. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
 
David A. Goldfarb (introducer) taught for eight years in the Slavic department at Barnard College, Columbia University. He has written on a range of writers and subjects, including Bruno Schulz, Witold Gombrowicz, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and East European cinema.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Classics; Illustrated edition (March 25, 2008)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143105140
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0143105145
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.1 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.05 x 0.61 x 7.67 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 140 ratings

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Bruno Schulz

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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
140 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Gio
5.0 out of 5 stars "The cat was washing itself in the sunlight."
Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2010
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No homework!
No plot summary! There's a plot against plotting, or plodding, on The Street of Crocodiles!
No exegesis! Except perhaps (6aR,9R)- N,N- diethyl- 7-methyl- 4,6,6a,7,8,9- hexahydroindolo- [4,3-fg] quinoline- 9-carboxamide in a naturally occurring form.
"Just tell us why you like this book, Bobby Lou."
"I like this book because the language is slinky and tastes like cinnamon cough syrup."
You know that painting by Vincent van Gogh of a stiff wicker-bottomed chair, just a chair sitting patiently without a butt upon it? How profound that chair looks, yet you couldn't possibly say why? The colors,maybe? Can colors have meaning in and of themselves?
Can music without words be more explicit than words?
Can words be as untranslatable as music?
Or as William Carlos Williams was wont to say: No meaning but in things.
Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Kenneth Patchen were out fishing one day. They were baiting their hooks with pages of Bruno Schulz's lost Messiah.

Page 84: ""There my father would sit, as if in an aviary, on a high stool; and the lofts of filing cabinets rustled with piles of paper and all the pigeonholes filled with the twitter of figures.""

Page 109: ""Uncle Edward was ringing to high heaven through all those bright and empty rooms. The lonely deserter from the stars, conscience stricken, as if he had come to commit an evil dead, retreated stealthily from the apartment, deafened by the constant ringing. He went to the front door accompanied by the vigilant mirrors which let him through their starry ranks, while into their depths there tiptoed a swarm of doubles with fingers to their lips.""

But lest you expire from anxiety, suffice it to say that Schulz's cockroach/magus father will avert the comet and save this jabberwocking planet of ours.

Shall we assert that The Street of Crocodiles is a memoir of Schulz's childhood in a remote Jewish stetl in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary now part of Ukraine, written in Polish flavored with Latin in the tradition of Kakanian bureaucratic German? Shall we also mention that Schulz spent his entire life as a teacher in that seemingly dreary town, and that he was murdered in the street by an SS officer of the Nazi occupation in retaliation for the murder of that officer's 'pet' Jew by the officer who was protecting Schulz while Schulz painted his -the officer's - child's nursery? Shall we venture to imply that insensate rage and fear of humanism is a universal psychological marker of nationalism and rightist conservatism? No, let's not assert, mention, or venture. Let's not crack the lid of Pandora's lunchbox.

Schulz's only other surviving works -- "Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass" plus three short stories -- are also included in this edition, all translated by Celina Wieniewska. Since I can't read a word of Polish, I have no idea how close Madam Wieniewska's English is to the original, but as English qua English, the writing in this book is rich and strange beyond anything I could quote. "Crocodiles" is so intense that I'm setting the book aside for a few days or weeks before plunging my aesthetic receptors into "Sanatorium." Consider this, therefore, half a review.

"Chapeau" to my amazoo cagemates Schneider and Byrd for coaxing me to read this incredible book!
10 people found this helpful
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Mike Huffman
5.0 out of 5 stars impressive writing
Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2023
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i have only read about 60 pages, but i am impressed by the language and the stories reminds me of kafka in some ways example: "Can there be anything sadder than a human being changed into the rubber tube of an enema?" if i enjoy the rest of the stories as much as these, it may be one of the best collections of short stories that i have ever read.
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H. Schneider
5.0 out of 5 stars The Powers of Adela
Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2010
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A most wonderful discovery. For a mental map of the world of this marvelous writer, you could think of roots in Andersen's fairy tales, in Frankenstein fantasies, Jung's archetypes, Freud's dreams and nightmares, de Sade's philosophical attempts, Sacher-Masoch's dominant women, Kafka's strange worlds (right down to a proper metamorphosis), Anton Reichenow's ornithological guide books with their engravings, Gombrowicz's strange worlds (BS illustrated Ferdyduke), you might even suspect Thomas Mann to have his fingers in it.
Shoots are found in Danilo Kis, or even in Salman Rushdie. One could see him as an ancestor of magical realism, but one should not blame him for that. One can also look at the theatre of the absurd.
The man was working and living his artificially shortened life at the cross-roads of the inter-war avant-garde, in a Polish backwater. Schulz was a graphic artist and a writer in the Polish language, living and dying in a Jewish town that was Austrian at his birth, became Polish, was Soviet occupied, and then Nazi occupied at the time of his death, and later became Ukrainian.
His death was absurd and tragically in line with the time: he was shot by a Nazi officer who met him outside the Jewish Ghetto, which he was not allowed to leave (except that he had been hired by a Gestapo officer to paint a mural inside his house; those paintings are now on show in Jerusalem's Yad Vashem, after a controversial transfer.)
I must admit I never heard of him until maybe a year or two ago, when I read Danilo Kis, the Serbian author of `Garden, Ashes' and other masterpieces. If you never heard of Schulz, you may not be alone.

Schulz published just two story collections during his lifetime. The two are included in this Penguin edition. The edition also includes his illustrations to some of the stories.
The cover page of this book is taken from his graphics collection `A Booke of Idolatry'. It shows a woman putting her foot in a man's face. Women with powers are frequent in his stories, like the housemaid Adela. The Idolatry book seems to be mostly about similar images. You can visit his gallery at one of the dedicated websites.

The book might with justification also be called a novel, with named short chapters offered as stories. The narrator is a boy whose mother runs a shop, and whose father is staying home, sick and dying, and doing crazy things. But the stories don't follow a time line. In one story the father has died, in a following one he is in the shop again. Or maybe he hasn't died properly, just morphed into a cockroach and come back.
Father is a philosopher and heresiarch, a secondary would-be demiurge (not being content with creating tailor's dummies, he also dabbles at creating immortality by doing away with the principium individuationis, or simpler said by converting individuals into matter - alas with damaging consequences). Man is only a transit station for electrical currents!
Adela shows up in most stories and does naughty things. Father fears her. Shop assistants lust for her.
Birds are frequent. One of my favorite stories is called `Birds', an absurd tale about a man creating an aviary inside the family house by hatching exotic bird eggs and cross-breading the outcome, until Adela cleans up. Many of the stories do not tell a tale, really, but give us images and situations, without anything `happening'. Others are like dream tales; for instance the Cinnamon Shops, which provided the original title. The title Street of Crocodiles was chosen for the American edition.
All poetry, in Schulz's view, is based on the discovery of ancient mythical relations between things.
The second story collection, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, is in a way a sequel, dealing with the same people, in the centre father and son, who are now explicitly known as Jakob and Joseph. And don't forget Adela.
There are more recognizable elements of memoirs. Joseph meets Bianca, a childhood girlfriend. He discovers his talent and passion for drawing. He discovers the marvels of stamps: they show us that Franz Josef I was not the ruler of the whole world!
These subjects seem to sound like any other boy's stories, but believe me, Schulz does it differently.
I notice I am stretching this too long and cut it short here. Go for it!
27 people found this helpful
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Marlene Melissa Davila
4.0 out of 5 stars A great book for those who love surreal short stories packed with metaphors
Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2017
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A great book for those who love surreal short stories packed with metaphors and dreams of a talented man.
The Street of Crocodiles is a world of its own; you fall in love immediately with the poetic writing and intriguing characters.
One person found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars so original
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 4, 2019
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Full of startling stories that twist and turn down strange alleyways of the mind. I have never read any writer who creates a landscape that feels closer to dream. The manner of the death of the author gives the stories an added layer of tragedy, but the stories range widely, there are joyous pieces as well as the stuff of nightmares. A book that has to be read.
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猫好き老人
5.0 out of 5 stars シュルッツはおもしろい
Reviewed in Japan on May 5, 2018
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　シュルッツの作品は日本語の作品集と全集で読んでいます。じっくり読むと面白い小説です。ポーランド語では読めませんが、英語ならどう表現しているのだろう、とおもい、今回購入しました。日本語で読むのとでは、ちょっと雰囲気が異なり、おもしろいです。これも読書の楽しみです。値段もそんなに高くなく、日本語訳とあわせて持っていれば意外と楽しめると思います。シュルッツの作品は独得の雰囲気があり、捨てがたい小説家です。シュルッツを読みだしてから四十年以上たちますが、いつのまにかF・カフカの小説をあまり読まなくなりました。もっと読まれていい小説家であり、すぐれた二十世紀前半ではおそらくただ一人のクリシェベールという版画の作家でもあり、あわせて見ると面白いです。
One person found this helpful
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Ilya S
3.0 out of 5 stars Pleasure to read, but impossible to understand
Reviewed in Canada on August 23, 2013
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I have only read about 50-60 pages of this book. At first I was mesmerized by it - the prose is truly beautiful, poetic, and rich in detail and substance. I think we also have to thank the translator for it. I stopped because I lost interest. It lacks substance. I'm usually a sucker for books that are beautifully written but do little in terms of plot (e.g. Virginia Woolf), but this is simply impossible to understand. I tried looking at it as symbolism and I'd wager some passages are about Nazi Germany, but as a whole it makes very little sense. I kept asking myself what I was reading, and why.

Perhaps if you wish to read this, you need to be knowledgeable about the time this was written and know the author's life pretty well (aside from its dramatic end). Maybe then it will make some sort of sense. But now I just feel like I'm reading Kafka on Haldol. I'm giving this 3 stars for quality of prose only.
4 people found this helpful
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jan
1.0 out of 5 stars and enjoyed many world classics so far
Reviewed in Canada on June 23, 2018
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I don't know if it's just me,but I don't get it,and I've read ,and enjoyed many world classics so far,but this one escapes me totally!?
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B.Graham
5.0 out of 5 stars Review
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 28, 2010
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Got into the guy through the Quay Bros.

Jewish,East European sensitivities between the 2 world wars.

Superb short stories shot through with realism,amazing flights of fancy all wrapped up in an adolescents view..Startlingly honest and a marvellous evocation of the times and philosophies
swirling around mid european states soon to be consumed by Fascism of the right and left.
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