The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 4 March 1998
by Bruno Schulz
In this diminutive collection of stories, the tragic Polish writer Schulz paints a complex portrait of the landscape in his childhood in Poland. The stories here evolve more from the physical landscape than from that of the characters, giving an intense life to inanimate objects. A sense of hidden madness, and threads of unspoken desires and fears permeate the book. Schulz writes of his father's creeping insanity, the strange and wondrous landscape of his small shop, and the forboding accompanying the end of the world with the approach of a comet. While Schulz's imagery and simile get a little repetitive, the atmosphere of living objects and mysterious confluence of life is compelling and hypnotic.