Bruno Schulz, _The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz_, trans. Celina Wieniewska

I HAVE BEEN meaning to read this for a long time--I bought it decades ago--and I am highly pleased that I  finally did. It is every bit as good as I always heard it was.

The book's two collections of short stories (The Street of Crocodiles [also known as Cinnamon Shops] and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass) both feel like novels, as almost all the stories have the same narrator, an adolescent named Joseph, and are about his family and neighborhood.

The family and neighborhood are probably quite a bit like Schulz's own. He was born in 1892 in a town named Drogobycz (or Drohobycz), which is currently within the borders of Ukraine, but within the boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian empire when Schulz was born and then in those of Poland after World War I. It was invaded and occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939, but in 1942--the year Schulz, a Jew, was murdered on the street by a Gestapo officer--it was occupied by the Germans. 

A lot of tumultuous and terrible history there, but the stories are all set in the years before the First World War, in what turned out to be the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Franz Joseph is still on the throne, but throughout the stories the reader gets a sense of a world only superficially stable, that may be dead but is refusing to lie down. The fires of adolescence are burning, but in a twilit world.

The tone is everything. Imagine a triangle whose three points are Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Marc Chagall. Schulz would be right at the center.

And hats off to Celina Wieniewska. She seems to hit an unusually happy word choice again and again. This is from the story "Cinnamon Shops": 

"The Professor delved into a deep bookcase, full of old folios, unfashionable engravings, woodcuts and prints. He showed us, with esoteric gestures, old lithographs of night landscapes, of tree clumps in moonlight, of avenues in wintry parks outlined black on the white moonlit background."

I don't know Polish and cannot make comparisons, but I imagine that Wieniewska had a few choices available for "unfashionable," "clips," and "wintry," and I am convinced that she found exactly the right one. And "delved"! She must be the Gregory Rabassa of Polish.