The Street of Crocodiles

This book was first published, in Polish, in 1934. It began as a series of letters from the reclusive Schulz to a friend, Deborah Vogel. Only two books by Schultz were published before he was murdered by the Gestapo in 1942. His novel, The Messiah, and his unpublished writings were lost.

Schulz's descriptions are like paintings, but more, because the objects are active and sounds, movement and colours all play a part.

"The dark second-floor apartment of the house in Market Square was shot through each day by the naked heat of summer: the silence of the shimmering streaks of air, the squares of brightness dreaming their intense dreams on the floor; the sound of a barrel organ rising from the deepest golden vein of a day; two or three bars show more of a chorus, played on a distant piano over and over again, melting in the sun on the white pavement, lost in the fire of high noon."

It's impossible to classify this book. It is a comic memoir with Schulz as the young narrator and his eccentric father as the main character. It is a fantasy of the end of the world, an elegy to the death of a Galician town and its way of life. In parts it makes no sense, but if you let the words wash over you, there is meaning all the same.

I really enjoyed this book, though it is not at all the sort of thing I usually read. I got lost, and had to re-read many paragraphs and pages, but because the book is so short there is no rush to reach the end. show less

This is possibly the strangest novel I have ever completed. I could no more summarize the plot than I could fly to the moon (as my mother used to say). At times it verges on word salad but once I got comfortable with Schulz' cadence and style, I got swept up in this exuberant, wild celebration of metaphor, anthropomorphism, zoomorphism, personification, paralipsis, allegory, allusion, and the magic of language. For example, I adore this description of the emergence of the bicycle:

"It was not long before the city filled with velocipedes of various sizes and shapes. An outlook based on philosophy became obligatory. Whoever admitted to a belief in progress had to draw the logical conclusion and ride a velocipede. The first to do so were show more of course the lawyers' apprentices, that vanguard of new ideas, with their waxed mustaches and their bowler hats, the hope and flower of youth. Pushing through the noisy mob, they rode through the traffic on enormous bicycles and tricycles which displayed their wire spokes. Placing their hands on wide handlebars, they maneuvered from the high saddle the enormous hoop of the wheel and cut into the amused mob in a wavy line. Some of them succumbed to apostolic zeal. Lifting themselves on their moving pedals, as if on stirrups, they addressed the crowd from on high, forecasting a new happy era for mankind -- salvation through the bicycle ... And they rode on amid the applause of the public, bowing in all directions."

Trust me, this is not a novel about bicycles, nor is it a novel about lawyers' apprentices, nor is it about mobs. It's about culture and the passage of time. Or something like that. But Schulz' brief tangent made me laugh out loud and fold down the corner of the page for safekeeping.

The novel is, at its most basic level, about the narrator's manic-depressive father and his wild, delusional schemes. The impact on the narrator is clearly disorienting, and to say that in this novel the line between madness and reality is blurred would be a vast understatement.

Schulz uses metaphor with remarkable inventiveness. Describing Mr. Charles' nightly descent into bed after "...the pressure of the hot empty days":

"Groping blindly in the darkness, he sank between the white mounds of cool feathers and slept as he fell, across the bed or with his head downward, pushing deep into the softness of the pillows, as if in sleep he wanted to drill through, to explore completely, that powerful massif of feather bedding rising out of the night. He fought in his sleep against the bed like a bather swimming against the current, he kneaded it and molded it with his body like an enormous bowl of dough, and woke up at dawn panting, covered with sweat, thrown up on the shores of that pile of bedding which he could not master in the nightly struggle. Half-landed from the depths of unconsciousness, he still hung on to the verge of night, gasping for breath, while the bedding grew around him, swelled and fermented -- and again engulfed him in a mountain of heavy, whitish dough."

Now *that* is some restless sleep!

This is a work to be savored, perhaps to be read aloud. At the risk of unparalleled gaucheness, as Nick so eloquently stated in the 1983 Hollywood film, "The Big Chill," don't be too analytical. "Sometimes you just have to let art ... flow ... over you." Or, probably more appropriately, I'll quote Schulz, himself:

"...truth is not a decisive factor for the success of an idea. Our metaphysical hunger is limited and can be satisfied quickly."

Indeed. show less

Describing the township’s fear of a comet, Bruno Schulz writes the situation like this:

… unready and unfinished, just as it was, at a random point in time and space, without closing its accounts, without having reached any goal, in mid-sentence as it were, without a period or an exclamation mark, without a last judgment, or God’s wrath – in an atmosphere of friendly undertaking, loyally, by mutual agreement and in accordance with the rules agreed by both parties – the world was to be hit on the head, simply and irrevocably. No, it wasn’t to be an eschatological, tragic finale as forecast long ago by the prophets, nor the last act of the Divine Comedy. No. It was to be a trick cyclist’s, a prestidigitator’s, end of the show more world, splendidly hocus-pocus and bogus-experimental - …

Rewriting those words one at a time and reading them over gives more weight to their richness than when I read them. This is a slow book to read. You miss so much if tired late at night on not properly focussed. I like the image “trick cyclist”, getting about on velocipedes had become a thing in this little township from which one could stare from a height into the second floor living rooms of its inhabitants. This early 20thC scene places its inhabitants both in the modern world, but still mentally trained by centuries of spiritual and powers greater than themselves to fly into rapture.

Many of the descriptions of people take on a part animal or atavistic character, too. The natural world and the civilised world seem to grow in and out of each other. The father of the narrator sits gargoyle or raptor-like on a pelmet; indoor plants everywhere, flocks of hatched birds live in the large apartment. The word velocipede, too, sounds like the marriage of the technological and the corporeal to understand the state of the present world. Everything in a Bruno Schulz story is fresh, new, yet old and wondrous at the same time.

Describing the father in a form receding backwards from the human, insect? bird?:

We became used to his harmless presence, to his soft babbling and that childlike self-absorbed twittering, which sounded as though they came from the margins of our own time

Or, the when the same father explains the apartment on one occasion:

in old apartments there are rooms that are sometimes forgotten. Unvisited for months on end, they wilt neglected between the old walls and it happens that they close in on themselves, becoming overgrown with bricks and, for all to our memory, forfeit their only claim to existence.

Or this description of the town early one:

The suburban houses were sinking, windows and all, into the exuberant tangle of blossom in their little gardens.

Even buildings have organic form, the capacity grow or neglect parts of themselves out of their matter. So, I’m left thinking that Schulz can imagine forms beyond what we ordinarily see. And find the words and images to relate them. It’s a unique vision. And lately I’ve been interested in this uniqueness in the writing of Richard Brautigan, who similarly reimagines the world in new forms out of existing materials.

Some of the language I found ponderous, though, long descriptions aren’t the easiest late at night; or, the physically tired reading states I found myself in. Reading over them, I realised it was me, not Bruno.

If you can imagine human, inert matter, animal, natural forms in the way Bruno does, you enter a place where you exist beyond just material forms. Perhaps that’s why we ended up with the minds we have, to realise such visions as Bruno has, of places, people and things in a tangle of relationships. Nothing is separate, or disparate, or categorically alien from anything else. show less

This is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read.

This was like looking at one long autumn oil painting in minute detail, inch by inch, as it passes very slowly before your eyes at the same time the sounds and smells of autumn drift in through an open window.

Reading this book clearly brought to mind the many other books that I have read that have tried to do this but failed disappointingly without me ever realising or knowing that there was one book that had managed to pull off this seemingly impossible feat of a physical sense of beauty being manifested by words.

The library's copy is from 1963, the first U.S. edition (though printed in Poland), with thick pages that every time you turn one you think you've paged through at least two. Pages of a bygone era of publishing, these particular pages of which are drenched with dream-prose, yet so full of grey, so many allusions to nothingness. Pages containing the descriptions of an outsider-dreamer, someone on the outside of the circle looking in, with sparkling, incisive cat's eyes, missing nothing yet not so much participating, instead restlessly transforming the carefully observed into a secret world, an entire universe lived in mystery, in wintry nights 'saturated with dreams and complications', where light always struggles against the dark, in show more sleep and in dreams, life shrinking inside the house and expanding outside it.

Came the yellow days of winter, filled with boredom. The rust-coloured earth was covered with a threadbare, meagre tablecloth of snow full of holes. There was not enough of it for some of the roofs and so they stood there, black and brown, shingle and thatch, arks containing the sooty expanses of attics—coal-black cathedrals, bristling with ribs of rafters, beams and spars—the dark lungs of winter winds.

There are birds, so many birds, for Father loves birds, importing their eggs from the far reaches of the world and hatching himself an entire community, even arranging avian marriages. And outside the house winter brings the crows...

The chimney-sweeps could not get rid of the crows which in the evening covered the branches of the trees around the church with living black leaves, then took off, fluttering, and came back, each clinging to its own place on its own branch, only to fly away at dawn in large flocks, like gusts of soot, flakes of dirt, undulating and fantastic, blackening with their insistent crowing the musty-yellow streaks of light.

Schulz's imagery is bold and fantastic; his figurative language splendidly surprises on every page. Coats are 'soaked with wind', horse-drawn cabs drive unattended, trams are made of papier mâché. The jacket copy generously declares Schulz to be 'one of the most remarkably gifted writers to have been produced in Eastern Europe in this century'. (I always find it amusing when a writer is said to have been produced, as if the writer was either a commodity spit out of a machine or a phantom conjured out of thin air by some literary-minded magician.)

I was reminded of Garden, Ashes, with its own dream-prose and Mad Father figure, also set in a pocket of the sprawling former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Schulz's narrator is farther removed, though, more distant from the action, sometimes even stepping into the collective 'we' and inviting the reader to travel along. This can feel jarring, especially when you have already been following, drifting down the dark misty streets the entire time, so that when he slips into 'we' and beckons to you, it's like when someone turns around abruptly, catching you in the act of furtive surveillance.

The city is a character. It is labyrinthine, shifty and shifting, prone to growing and shedding extra streets, rearranging itself at will. The shops are alluring, especially during the Great Season, when the citizenry catches the shopping fever.

The time of the Great Season was approaching. The streets were getting busy. At six in the evening the city became feverish, the houses stood flushed, and people walked about made up in bright colours, illuminated by some interior fire, their eyes shining with a festive fever, beautiful yet evil.

There is humor, not too much of the laugh-out-loud quality, but enough. There is absurdity in spades. The reader enters the dream realm where all natural laws are suspended. We become concerned with the architecture of dreams, how the world inside is built, the framework of the interior, the details of the place. It's a world where certain years 'grow a thirteenth freak month […], a hunchback month, a half-wilted shoot, more tentative than real'. This rogue month usually occurs after August, and it's clearly the fault of 'the senile intemperance of summer, its lustful and belated spurt of vitality', spawning 'crab-days, weed-days, sterile and stupid, added as an afterthought; stunted, empty, useless days—white days, permanently astonished and quite unnecessary. They sprout, irregular and uneven, formless and joined like the fingers of a monster's hand, stumps folded like a fist'.

Father is the de facto leader-guide of this dream realm. Father, at war with the cockroaches, even as he becomes more cockroach-like himself. Father, amateur ornithologist, who with his motley multicolored flock is really just trying to liven things up, to counter winter's deadly boredom. Father, somewhat obsessed with Adela, the lively housekeeper, who is the only one to hold any semblance of power over him. Father, who lives an 'odd and dubious' existence, sometimes a shop owner, sometimes a philosopher, sometimes a scientist, sometimes manic, sometimes worn and despondent.

Meanwhile in the city, on Crocodile Street, 'nothing ever succeeds there, nothing can ever reach a definite conclusion. Gestures hang in the air, movements are prematurely exhausted and cannot overcome a certain point of inertia. […] Nowhere as much as there do we feel threatened by possibilities, shaken by the nearness of fulfilment, pale and faint with the delightful rigidity of realisation. And that is as far as it goes'. This locale is an affront to our narrator, 'a concession of our city to modernity and metropolitan corruption'.

And while down below everything disintegrated and changed into nothingness in that silent panic of quick dissolution, above there grew and endured the alarum of sunset, vibrating with the tinkling of a million tiny bells set in motion by the rise of a million unseen larks flying together into the enormous silvery infinite.

The temptation is to continue pasting huge swaths of the text into this box. I wanted to crawl inside the pages of the book, to pull the words over my head and sleep for hundreds of years, as 'the pages of days turned emptily' and I slipped farther and farther into the dream realm. But even in Schulz's dream realm there are moments of the blissful mundane, a subtle reminder that everyday life can also seem otherworldly, can also transport us to another realm, each moment a potential passageway, if only we can stay in the present and remain open to our surroundings.

In the kitchen, on the floor above, Adela, warm from sleep and with unkempt hair, was grinding coffee in a mill which she pressed to her white bosom, imparting her warmth to the broken beans. The cat was washing itself in the sunlight. show less

Bruno Schulz had an imagination like no one else. His metaphors, similes, and personifications whirl the reader through a cosmos as vivid and surreal as Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” His characters prophesy like the enigmatic beings that inhabit the pages of William Blake. At once fiction and nonfiction, prose and poetry, memory and dream, The Street of Crocodiles defies categorization.

Schulz is sometimes compared to Kafka, but he should not be. He is not Kafkaesque. The world of Kafka is a nightmare world ~ a nightmare from which one cannot awaken. The world of Schulz is the real world touched by the fantastic, the real world as perceived in a dream. Nor is this magical realism, for elements of fantasy do not truly invade the real show more world. It is only the narrator’s perceptions which import the fantastic or the grotesque into the real.

The distortions of reality—of time and space—are distortions imposed by the mind of the observer. And the observer is the mythopoeic visionary Bruno Schulz, a man whose dream world is superimposed upon the real one, a man who is at home with the visions of prophets and madmen, a man who never quite lost the childhood ability to see behind the curtain of the mundane, to glimpse the cosmic wonders through which the mass of men and women sleepwalk. Schulz is like one who awakens in a dream.

The following passages highlight three dream elements in The Street of Crocodiles. First, there is spatial distortion.

“I stepped into a winter night bright from the illuminations of the sky. It was one of those clear nights when the starry firmament is so wide and spreads so far that it seems to be divided and broken up into a mass of separate skies, sufficient for a whole month of winter nights and providing silver and painted globes to cover all the nightly phenomena, adventures, occurrences and carnivals.

It is exceedingly thoughtless to send a young boy out on an urgent and important errand into a night like that because in its semiobscurity the streets multiply, becoming confused and interchanged. There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are doubles, make-believe streets. One’s imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which the streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night...” (87-88).

Second, there is temporal distortion.

“Everyone knows that 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.

We use the word ‘freak’ deliberately, because the thirteenth month only rarely reaches maturity, and like a child conceived late in its mother’s life, it lags behind in growth; it is a hunchback month, a half-witted shoot, more tentative than real.

What is at fault is the senile intemperance of the summer, its lustful and belated spurt of vitality. It sometimes happens that August has passed, and yet the old thick trunk of summer continues by force of habit to produce and from its moldered wood grows those crab-days, weed-days, sterile and stupid, added as an afterthought; stunted, empty, useless days –white days, permanently astonished and quite unnecessary. They sprout, irregular and uneven, formless and joined like the fingers of a monster's hand, stumps folded into a fist.

There are people who liken these days to an apocrypha, put secretly between the chapters of the great book of the year; to palimpsests, covertly included between its pages; to those white, unprinted sheets on which eyes, replete with reading and the remembered shapes of words, can imagine colors and pictures, which gradually become paler and paler from the blankness of the pages, or can rest on their neutrality before continuing the quest for new adventures in new chapters” (125-126).

And last, there is the uncanny ~ the revelation of an occult world that coexists with the real world, a world hidden from all but the few whose peculiar nature allows them to discover it.

“... at that late hour the strange and most attractive shops were sometimes open, the shops which on ordinary days one tended to overlook. I used to call them cinnamon shops because of the dark paneling of their walls.

These truly noble shops, open late at night, have always been the objects of my ardent interest. Dimly lit, their dark and solemn interiors were redolent of the smell of paint, varnish and incense; of the aroma of distant countries and rare commodities. You could find in them Bengal lights, magic boxes, the stamps of long-forgotten countries, Chinese decals, indigo, calaphony from Malabar, the eggs of exotic insects, parrots, toucans, live salamanders and basilisks, mandrake roots, mechanical toys from Nuremberg, homunculi in jars, microscopes, binoculars and most especially strange and rare books, old folio volumes full of astonishing engravings and amazing stories.

I remember those old dignified merchants who served their customers with downcast eyes, in discreet silence, and who were full of wisdom and tolerance for their customers’ most secret whims. But most of all, I remember a bookshop in which I once glanced at some rare and forbidden pamphlets, the publications of secret societies lifting the veil on tantalizing and unknown mysteries” (89).

Familiar streets transformed into a marvelous labyrinth, time extending beyond its natural limits, an esoteric ‘other world’ concealed in the midst of the ordinary and everyday ~ this is the dreamy Drohobych of Schulz’s imagination, a mythic city described in rich prose that alternately drips with the golden juices of ripe fruit or scuttles mechanically on spidery legs or entices the mind with cryptic messages of mystical import.

The Street of Crocodiles is a weird and wondrous book. When Schulz was murdered at the age of fifty, shot by a Nazi soldier, the world lost a truly unique artist. show less

Bruno Schulz's prose is rich with poetic imagery. His dreamlike surreal pace of this fictional autobiography could be considered an extended prose poem as well as a collection of short stories. Moving at a languid pace with dreamlike logic, it will unexpectedly turn into a frenzy of absurd brilliance, and along the way the author drops hints that all this is not as it seems.

For example, in the story “Cockroaches,” the protagonist confronts his mother about his eccentric deceased father’s remains. It starts with a description of stuffed condor that’s a bit worse for wear. His mother is reclining, suffering from a migraine, nevertheless he confronts her with the frank question: “I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time: show more it is he isn’t it?” indicating the stuffed bird.

She accuses him of spreading stories and lies. Then she goes on to remind him of his father’s obsession with cockroaches that drove him into such a state that he became one and then flew apart into a swarm of them and scuttled off into the woodwork. He does remember all this.
“And yet, I say disconcerted, “I am sure that this condor is he.”

My mother looked at me from under her eyelashes.

“Don’t torture me darling; I have told you already that Father is away, traveling all over the country: he now has a job as a commercial traveler. You know that he sometimes come home at night and goes away again before dawn.”

In the following stories, his father, very much alive, is still with them, conducting experiments with electricity that apparently turns his brother-in-law into an electric bell that disintegrates just as the comet that about to destroy the world approaches Earth. show less