Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #237295 in Books
• Published on: 1988-11-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Customer Reviews

Gorgeous and disturbing
Realaty and fantasy segue into one another, evoking childhood, madness, Proustian metaphor and Eastern European townscapes dramatised by the heart breaking picture of Shulz's crazed father and his own awful yet strangely apt destiny of the Gestapo bullet. At first the exchange of matter with opposites, solid, liquid, gaseous, and materials and colours with theirs, the metamorphosis of perception,diverts, amuses absorbs - until the accuracy of the decription - at night - undermines your preconceptions and you enter his world of tunneled darkness,
mystic brightness and eery others - of beauty from another realm. Excellent secondhand service from Caroline Downing.

Strange but beautiful
Some of this deserves to be read out loud - bit of it reminded me oddly of a Polish-Jewish 'Under Milk Wood'. There is a powerful dreamlike quality to the writing -- vivid, emotional, and not very narrative. If you like carefully crafted short stories with a beginning middle and end then this is not for you -- but the quality of the writing is superb. It made me think of the those little gothic models of rooms and their inhabitants that you sometimes see in museums. Made all the more poignant by the fact that I've now read all of Bruno Schults's published work. If you liked this and are equally sorry that there is no more, you could do worse than trying Ishiguro's 'The Unconsoled'.