“In winter it would be still deep night when Father went down to these cold and dark rooms, the light of his candle scattering flocks of shadows so that they fled sideways along the floor and up the walls; his task to wake the snoring men from their stone-hard sleep.”
Most of the stories I’ve chosen for this list have been percolating in my mind for at least a year – some, decades. In contrast, I discovered Bruno Schulz a month or so ago and I’m absolutely giddy about it. It was a bit like finding out about a new spice – how did I not know that things could taste like Cardamom? Suddenly and inexorably there’s another flavour in the world.
All the stories in this book (is it a collection? Is it actually a novel?) are dark, funny, and intensely weird. This particular one is about a man in conflict with the Demiurge. Its images are often shocking in their potency – ‘illness settled like a rug in the room’, ‘suddenly the window opened with a dark yawn’, ‘father began to shrink day to day, like a nut drying inside a shell’.
There is just a tiny bit of shit again (sorry), but unlike the previous story ‘Artur and Isabella’, it’s defiantlyexcremental – a chamber-pot emptied into the darkness as a nose-thumb to the divine. A man’s heroic, insane, tragic refusal to submit to the dictates of form.
English translation published in ‘The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories’, Walker, 1963
A Personal Anthology 