It’s a collection of all the stories written by Schulz, a Polish writer murdered during WWII, and I can’t quite describe it. I am about a third of the way through because I am reading it very slowly — a few pages at a time, to get the most out of its language and strangeness. I got it out of the library but then bought a copy because I know I will be re-reading it.
It’s in the same Eastern Europe/Russian/Ukrainian/Jewish current of the fantastical as I.B. Singer, Kafka, Bulgakov’s *Master and Margarita,* Gogol, and Nikolai Leskov. I really can’t tell you what it’s about. That will take many re-readings. Not much happens and yet everything happens. An insignificant town is made magnificent and more insignificant as its strangeness is revealed.
>There, in those charred, many-raftered forests of attics, darkness began to degenerate and ferment wildly. There began the black parliaments of saucepans, those verbose and inconclusive meetings, those gurglings of bottles, those stammerings of flagons. Until one night the regiments of saucepans and bottles rose under the empty roofs and marched in a great bulging mass against the city.
In *A Brief History of Myth* Karen Armstrong wrote: “From the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.”
Some of that is here. There is certainly a larger setting, but one we have no chance of understanding. It certainly isn’t about life having meaning and value. However, it is not nihilistic. Incomprehensible life is in everything here — the saucepans, building facades, clothes, food. They are all alive and have more understanding of the world, or less need to understand the world, than the confused people who stumble around, failing to see.
I feel like I’ve been waiting for this book and never knew it.
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by 13curseyoukhan
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Have you seen the animated film “The Street of Crocodiles” by the Brothers Quay? This was inspired by the story by Bruno Schultz. The Brothers Quay’s work is generally surreal and dark.”Rather than literally representing the childhood memoirs of Schulz, the animators used the story’s mood and psychological undertones as inspiration for their own creation.”
I cannot guarantee that you will like it but it is definitely worth watching (about 20 mins) . It was selected by director and animator Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best animated films of all time.
[There is an introduction to it here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WMmgi7RhoU)