the street of crocodiles and other stories bruno schulz

He steps through a great hall into the street again and comes upon a line of horse-drawn cabs. It is a grand affair where he imagines meeting the official’s daughter. When he recognizes the high school building, he is lost in a reverie about the drawing class he took there, and wanders into the principal’s residential wing, an area that he has never seen before. Or to parts of familiar buildings and streets that appear completely strange. In this story, “Cinnamon Shops”, a boy is sent on an errand to retrieve his father’s wallet from home, but all the familiar turns he takes lead him to unfamiliar places. 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.” The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz translated by Celina Wieniewska, hardcover edition, p54-5 “There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are doubles, make-believe streets. The rest of that paragraph shows the richness of Schulz’ unique imagination. I prefer the version in the Celina Wieniewska translation.

That must have been one of the inspirations for Miéville’s brilliant book, but it also opens the door to Schulz’ fiction as well as any quotation could. “Deep inside the town there open up, so to speak, double streets, doppelgänger streets, mendacious and delusive streets” Bruno Schulz, The Cinnamon Shops, translated by John Curran Davis He refused to leave, even after gaining some fame in the 1930s, and was killed there by Nazi violence in 1942 when he was just 50.Ĭhina Miéville paid homage to these stories with this epigraph (from a different translation) that opens The City & The City:

Schulz spent most of his life in that town, Drohobycz, in southeastern Poland where he taught high school. Schulz is building a fantasy city that follows its own rules on top of the drab reality of his Polish hometown, one that could only exist in the rich language of his crowded imagination. The words on the page begin to transform into mythical and unreal objects as you read.

The street of crocodiles and other stories bruno schulz