A fantastic book of short stories translated from their original text. Translated works are always hit or miss and this one ended up being a gem. While the ornate prose might be a turn off for some people, I was taken in by the writing.

Collected Stories by Bruno Schulz is a collection of short stories comprised of two published works and additional uncollected stories. Schulz was a Polish Jewish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher. He is regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award.

There are two things that make this collection great. The first is the writing style. Schulz is perhaps the only readily known Polish modernist in the West. It takes only a short time before the reader is drawn into the minds of the characters. The settings gain importance over the concept of plot and are rich in imagery. The imagery is not only found in the great things but also in the mundane like fish in aspic. The characters get the same treatment:

What remained of him was a small amount of corporeal casing and that
handful of senseless eccentricities—they could disappear one day, as unnoticed
as the gray pile of trash collecting in a corner that Adela carried out
every day to the garbage bin.

The second thing that makes this collection significant is the translation work by Madeline G. Levine. Levine is Kenan Professor of Slavic Literatures Emerita at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her translations from Polish include The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories by Hanna Krall, Bread for the Departed by Bogdan Wojdowski, and four volumes of prose by Czesław Miłosz. The introduction documents the checking and rechecking by another party of the translation. The goal is to capture the essence and accuracy of the original language. The proper use of translation, even if sometimes unwieldy in English or using words that are not in common use, like hill-lock hump, adds depth and accuracy to reading and concentrates the reader's effort and attention.

Collected Stories offers the reader a look inside of Polish fiction of the modernist period. There are many similarities in the writing to Woolf's later poetic prose. Stream of consciousness plays out through the stories. As many of the stories take place in the past, the effects of memory play an important role in the storytelling much like in Proust. Talking to an acquaintance who was born and raised in Poland, Schulz is wonderful and read by most in high school. After reading this collection, I would definitely agree with the wonderful.

DNF. A family of four lived in a dark, shaded apartment with wallpaper yellowed from the excessive summer heat. The dimly lit apartment, above their dressmaking business, was in a state of neglect. The father's health deteriorated as he experienced loss of his mental faculties. He conversed with himself, was often agitated and sometimes became glazed over like an automaton. The metaphors, although excellent, were not enough to help maintain my interest level in continuing to read and fairly assess this tome. It would be unfair to rate "Collected Stories" by Bruno Schulz, a book I did not finish.

Thank you Northwestern University press and Net Galley for the opportunity to read and review "Collected Stories".

Collected Stories is one of those collections that keep literary reviewers and prestigious literary journals buzzing with over excitement. Whether it is his collection of ‘Street of Crocodiles’ or the later collection ‘Sanatorium under the Sign of an Hourglass’, Schulz work is very well recognised within the upper brow annuals of literary fiction.

Keeping this mind, I personally tend to find difficulties reading this type of work as it is supposed to be the cream of the crop and held to such a high level that often times, the work does not stand up to the praise. I can safely say that with this collection of stories and the writing of Bruno Schulz, this most definitely lives up to its reputation.

Schulz’s writing style borders on extreme beauty and surrealism and he balances these to create an incredible body of work. The writing style is not short and sweet and he places his structuring, at times long winded, which to the modern novelist reader, can seem a bit out of sync but if you open your mind and let it wash over you, I think you would be presently surprise.

The work is a translation from the original Polish text and at times I often wonder how much of the writing is in the style of Schulz’s writing and how much of it has been flourished with English prose. As I don’t read Polish, I looked at the stories as the way that they are written. Looking at them from this view point, there are time that the descriptive text seems to be over flourished but this really doesn’t take away from the over enjoyment of the stories found within.

Overall, I would not suggest reading these in one go. This collection of stories works best reading it in parts. Read a story, walk away and read something else and you will find that each individual tale will stay ingrained within your subconscious. Your brain will be returning to them time and time again. The writing style will not be for everyone but if you are in love with the written word, there is plenty to feast your mind on. Take a chance and you will not be disappointed.

I remember writing what I imagined to be a brilliant story when I was around 13 years old. It was full of metaphor, artistic language and descriptive language, and I had agonised over every word to make it feel like I had painted a picture with words. I handed that story in for my English homework and when I got it back, the teacher had written 'too much purple prose' on it. And that was it. That was all the feedback I received for my hours of work. I was stunned. I still have that short story, and reading it now, I can see how awful, pretentious and flowery it actually was. I relay this little anecdote because it is all I could think of when reading these collected short writings. Too much purple prose.

Everyone should read Bruno Schulz, if only to remind themselves that a true master of the short-story form has been around for so long. These stories are devastating.

"Duplicate streets, doppelganger streets, lying and deceptive streets, so to speak, reveal themselves in the depths of the city."
from The Cinnamon Shops

Fans of China Mieville's The City and The City (I'm not one! - see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1809136762) will recognise that quote, in a slightly different translation by John Curran Davis, as the epigraph and perhaps the inspiration of that novel.

And Mieville joins a long list of authors with an acknowledged debt to Bruno Schulz in their work, borrowing quotations, characters, aspects of his life (in addition to the undoubted many on whom his influence is less explicitly noted) such as:

- 2017 MBI winning David Grossman - whose See Under: Love is based around the story of Schulz's death (under the protection of one Gestapo officer in occupied Poland, he was shot in the street by a rival officer), except in his novel the narrator helps him escape his fate by turning him into a salmom

- the legendary Roberto Bolaño: the narrator of his Distant Star reads Schulz's work during the story

- Booker of Booker winning Salman Rushdie, whose Moor's Last Sigh recreates Schulz's Street of Crocodiles but in Andalucia:

"I felt as if I were in some sort of interregnum, in some timeless zone under the sign of an hourglass in which the sand stood motionless, or a clepsydra whose quicksilver had ceased to flow. […] I wandered down sausage-festooned streets of bakeries and cinnamon shops, smelling, instead, the sweet scents of meat and pastries and fresh-baked bread, and surrendered myself to the cryptic laws of the town."
(Rushdie: The Moor's Last Sigh)

- Danilo Kiš whose "family trilogy" owes a large debt to Schulz (“Schulz is my God” he told John Updike): e.g. the title of the last of the trilogy Hourglass rather echoes Schulz's Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass and his Treatise on the Potato therein Schulz' Treatise on Tailors' Dummies

- Jonathan Safran Foer whose Tree of Codes is formed from cutting up his favourite book of all - Schulz's Street of Crocodiles (the words Tree of Codes can be made from a subset of the letters in Street of Crocodiles)

as well as others such as Cynthia Ozick (The Messiah of Stockholm), Philip Roth (the Czech author in The Prague Orgy is essentially Schulz) and Nicole Krauss (The History of Love).

(see http://jewishquarterly.org/2011/06/appropriations-of-bruno-schulz/ for a more detailed survey)

Several of those books are based on the legend of Schulz's lost work, The Messiah, a work some scholars believe perhaps never existed. But what we have hear is the work that Schulz did complete in his brief lifetime - the two story collections The Cinnamon Streets & Other Stories (the original English language publisher chose to present it under the title of another story, The Street of Crocodiles, against the translator's wishes) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, as well as some miscellania.

The lazy reviewers guide to Bruno Schulz would be Witold Gombrowicz meets Franz Kafka, and it is not hard to apparently see the influence of the latter, particularly in The Cinnamon Shops collection:

Many of the stories concern his increasingly eccentric father, who first develops a mania for birds which starts with collecting and incubating rare eggs, but ends with him taking on avian-like characteristics himself, then becomes obsessed with cockroaches, again starting to resemble one himself ("my father was turning into a cockroach"). Querying his father's absence, the narrator asks his mother whether his father is now one of the cockroaches in the house, or perhaps instead the stuffed condor, the last remnant of his avian obsession, although his mother retorts: "I already told you that father is travelling about the country as a travelling salesman."

Or in the labyrinth corridors of the family home, rooms that disappear or come literally alive, and also the confusion of the city's streets (see the opening quotes) or houses:

"Having entered the wrong vestibule and the wrong stairwell, one usually wound up in a veritable labyrinth of unfamiliar apartments and passageways, unexpected exits into unfamiliar courtyards, and one forgot the original goal of the expedition, until, many days later, while returning on some grey dawn from the uncharted territories of strange, matted adventures, one remembered amid pangs of conscience one's family home."

But to spoil the story, while Schulz was to translate Kafka into Polish, he apparently only read Kafka after he was sent a copy to review following the publication of The Cinnamon Shops. One can instead perhaps, equally lazily, suggest they drew on the same (post) Austro-Hungarian empire world of bureaucracy breaking down and mitteleuropean melancholia.

The reality is that Schulz has a surreal style all of his own - one that I can admire sometimes more than appreciate. The narrator's of Distant Star (see above) sums the effect up well: “The words went scuttling past like beetles, busy at incomprehensible tasks.”

I read Schulz's works in 2004, and again a few years later. The reason for revisiting them now is the publication of a new translation by Madeline Levine, the original works having been brought into English in the 1960-1970s by Celina Wieniewska.

I'm not, as a rule, a massive fan of retranslations of classic works. There is far too much great but untranslated literature that would better command an enthusiastic translator's attention, and much retranslation does seem to be nitpicking with the original - the occasional case where the original was badly flawed tends to be the exception rather than the rule.

Here I was pleased to see that Levine praises the 'undeniable magic of Wieniewska's English version.' She justifies retranslation generally on the grounds that "the richer the original, the more interpretations it can sustain. Translation is both a scholarly art and a performance,' which is fair enough but still leaves my concern with efficient use of translation resources.

Specifically, she argues that while her predecessor 'intended to convey the visual images and bizarre events that distinguish Schulz's stories,' she did this by 'taming his prose.' Levine's aim is to 'get closer to the texture of Schulz's prose by stretching English syntax to make it accommodate the sinousity of Schulz's longer sentences rather than reigning them in,' and also to closer mirror Schulz's repetition and alliteration and the use, as much as possible, of the prefix dis- (mirroring an equivalent Polish term).

I must admit I struggled, comparing the translations side by side, to detect such a significant difference, other perhaps than Levine drawing on a richer English vocabulary. Compare for example the literally labyrinthine sentence above to Wieniewska's version.

"For, once you had entered the wrong doorway and set foot on the wrong staircase, you were liable to find oneself in a real labyrinth of unfamiliar apartments and balconies, and unexpected doors opening onto strange empty courtyards, and you forgot the initial object of the expedition, only to recall it days later after numerous strange and complicated adventures, on regaining the family home in the grey light of dawn."

(See this for a further discussion: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2017/09/20/the-good-bad-translator-celina-wieniewska-and-her-bruno-schulz/)

So overall Schulz is an author one ought to read if only for his profound influence on others. This translation will likely become the new standard, and for someone new to Schulz would be the right starting place. But I wouldn't recommend it as a vital choice over the existing one which remains fit for purpose.