Mike Russell’s Blog

(in which Mike Russell talks about other people’s strange books)

2.Bruno Schulz

Many years ago, late at night, in a room above a bookshop, I switched on a barely tuned television and watched a beautiful dream unfold before me. My friend fell asleep. I stayed awake, mesmerised. It was a movie called ‘Institute Benjamenta’ by the Quay Brothers. I hadn’t heard of the Quay Brothers. I was delighted to discover that they were identical twins. The next film of theirs I watched was ‘Street of Crocodiles’. It was liminal, magical; a film of things almost but not quite happening, things almost but not quite seen… I read that it was based on a story by someone called Bruno Schulz. I bought the book. Bruno Schulz wrote two short story collections, or you could even call them novels, or one novel in two parts: ‘Street of Crocodiles’ and ‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass’. In fact, he wrote more books (including an unfinished novel) but we were robbed of them by the Holocaust. The two books that exist are, however, like a microcosm that could be extended by inference indefinitely; it’s as if there are a thousand Bruno Schulz books, all contained between the words of the two we know. Shot dead by a Nazi officer at the age of fifty, his writing displays a sensitivity that is the antithesis of something so stupid, brutal and gross as firing a bullet into a human being. His stories are amorphous tales. There is a delight in the absurd, the surreal, no more so than in the author/protagonist’s love of his fathers’ bizarre, irrational, impolite behaviour caused by his mental ill health, not because of his father’s suffering but because his father’s strange actions and ideas break through the usual, mundane and acceptable. There are complex emotions. There is another movie based on his work by Wojciech Has (‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass’), colourful and lively, which concentrates more on the absurd imagery of the stories, rather than the atmosphere and poetry focused on by the Quay Brothers. But as with many books, there is so much that is un-filmable. I love Bruno Schulz most when his stories cannot contain his passion and his writing bursts out into reverie. He creates a mood; a mood of receptivity. You may find the world more wonderful and deep after reading Bruno Schulz.