(Find me at 50 Watts Books.)
Cover art: Bruno Schulz, Primordial Fable II,
from the series "A Book of Idolatry," ca. 1922.
Collage: Jennifer Wang
A 2008 Penguin publication brings together Bruno Schulz's two short story collections, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (my second-ever blog post was about Sanitorium). I'll let The Book speak for itself.
To set the scene:
Sometimes my father would wander off and leave me alone with The Book; the wind would rustle through its pages and the pictures would rise. And as the windswept pages were turned, merging the colors and shapes, a shiver ran through the columns of text, freeing from among the letters flocks of swallows and larks. Page after page floated in the air and gently saturated the landscape with brightness. At other times, The Book lay still and the wind opened it softly like a huge cabbage rose; the petals, one by one, eyelid under eyelid, all blind, velvety, and dreamy, slowly disclosed a blue pupil, a colored peacock's heart, or a chattering nest of hummingbirds.
***
[below is the complete 2nd numbered paragraph]
On a dark wintry morning I woke up early (under the banks of darkness a grim dawn shone in the depths below) and while a multitude of misty figures and signs still crowded under my eyelids, I began to dream confusedly, tormented by various regrets about the old, forgotten Book.
No one could understand me and, vexed be their obtuseness, I began to nag more urgently, molesting my parents with angry impatience.
Barefoot, wearing only my nightshirt and trembling with excitement, I riffled the books on Father's bookshelves, and, angry and disappointed, I tried to describe to a stunned audience that indescribable thing, which no words, no pictures drawn with a trembling and elongated finger, could evoke. I exhausted myself in endless explanations, complicated and contradictory, and cried in helpless despair.
My parents towered over me, perplexed, ashamed of their helplessness. They could not help feeling uneasy. My vehemence, the impatient and feverish urgency of my tone, made me appear to be in the right, to have a well-founded grievance. They came up to me with various books and pressed them into my hands. I threw them away indignantly.
One of them, a thick and heavy tome, was again and again pushed toward me by my father. I opened it. It was the Bible. I saw in its pages a great wandering of animals, filling the roads, branching off into processions heading for distant lands. I saw a sky filled with flocks of birds in flight, and an enormous, upturned pyramid on whose flat top rested the Ark.
I raised my reproachful eyes to Father.
"You must know, Father," I cried, "you must. Don't pretend, don't quibble! This book has given you away. Why do you give me that fake copy, that reproduction, a clumsy falsification? What have you done with The Book?"
My father averted his eyes.
***
From "The Book" by Bruno Schulz, the opening 14-page story of Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, a story collection now contained in full in The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories (Penguin 2008, ISBN 9780143105145, trans. Celina Wieniewska).
***Here's my archived post from August 5, 2007:
"He wrote sometimes like Kafka, sometimes like Proust, and at times succeeded in reaching depths that neither of them reached." —Isaac Singer on Bruno Schulz
Bruno Schulz is one of my favorite writers. His story collection The Street of Crocodiles (also known as 'Cinnamon Shops') is currently in print from Penguin. You should buy it immediately. You can view Schulz's fantastic drawings here (also collected in a book). His only other collection of stories, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, is out of print. This is pathetic! Paul Dry wasn't interested, perhaps scared off by the title, and definitely because I didn't force him to read it. It was last published in 1997 by Mariner Books. The edition scanned here is the first US publication (I've never seen a UK edition): Walker and Company, 1978, jacket design by Mel Brofman. I love this detail from the back cover: "A Note on the illustrations: Bruno Schulz produced his drawings by etching them on spoiled photographic plates he obtained from drugstores..."