The utter lack of plots in the stories eventually wore me down. It's sort of a prose cubism he has sentences and paragraphs that give the basic shapes of a character, but they are ultimately flat and abstract. Schulz even references this in a story called "A Treatise on Tailor's Dummies" where he talks about a second genesis, and how the new race of men will only be created to serve a single purpose, some to only utter a single word, and there will be no need to fill in anything beyond this single purpose. Unfortunately, when the characters do show up, they are very thin and two dimensional. He seemed to be setting a stage, and I assumed that later characters would come to inhabit this stage. But even from the first stories, I noticed that they were almost all setting, with very little character building. The first few stories are filled with beautiful images and innovative uses of the language that promise at great things to come. ( )Ī rare book that I started and didn't finish. I got lost, and had to re-read many paragraphs and pages, but because the book is so short there is no rush to reach the end. I really enjoyed this book, though it is not at all the sort of thing I usually read. In parts it makes no sense, but if you let the words wash over you, there is meaning all the same. It is a fantasy of the end of the world, an elegy to the death of a Galician town and its way of life. It is a comic memoir with Schulz as the young narrator and his eccentric father as the main character. "The dark second-floor apartment of the house in Market Square was shot through each day by the naked heat of summer: the silence of the shimmering streaks of air, the squares of brightness dreaming their intense dreams on the floor the sound of a barrel organ rising from the deepest golden vein of a day two or three bars of a chorus, played on a distant piano over and over again, melting in the sun on the white pavement, lost in the fire of high noon." Schulz's descriptions are like paintings, but more, because the objects are active and sounds, movement and colours all play a part.
His novel, The Messiah, and his unpublished writings were lost. Only two books by Schultz were published before he was murdered by the Gestapo in 1942. It began as a series of letters from the reclusive Schulz to a friend, Deborah Vogel. This book was first published, in Polish, in 1934.
0 kommentar(er)
