The Street of Crocodiles
Book | Bruno Schulz
An hallucinatory tableau of life in Drogobych, Poland.
In the period between World War I and World War II, the Polish artist Bruno Schulz made his writing debut with The Street of Crocodiles. A collection of interlocking stories adapted from letters to his friend Debora Vogel, Street portrays the city of Drogobych with painterly detail, while focusing on the members of the narrator's family. Schulz's rich language latches onto everything: from fruit to clouds and dogs to kitchens, allowing each thing to assume a hyper-real lushness. These dense, dizzying descriptions, however, occasionally impair plot progression. Some of the stories seem, in fact, to lack any climax whatsoever. But the pleasure of The Street of Crocodiles is not in the actions of the narrator, his merchant father, his mother, or their beautiful servant Adela. It is in the abundance of impressions and fantastical observations which seen together show how the sensory overload of everyday existence can transform the most mundane of lives into a colorful, fecund, and hallucinatory experience.
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