The Cinnamon Shops and Other Stories (Writings by Bruno Schulz)

This hard-to-acquire book arrived in its described condition and, no mean feat during this pandemic, on time. Amazon Prime makes all the difference.

When I first read "The Street of Crocodiles" (correctly translated here as "The Cinnamon Shops") I was completely absorbed by Bruno Schulz's ecstatic descriptions of his childhood world. His stories tell of mundane and mystifying events in a Polish town where every person, plant, animal, insect, place and thing overflows with a peculiar vitality. The narrator is a little boy, but the narration often follows the sensuous movements of the story beyond any definite perspective, opening onto circulating currents of metamorphic imagery, shaping an entire narrative climate. Reading John Curran Davis's version was like returning to this climate with freshness and clarity. His meticulous translation reveals a vivid complexity that English readers could have only suspected and imagined before now. Davis's language moves in flickering, undulating tangles, alive and unbounded - a language of Schulz's world.