…we heard him talk to God, as if begging for something or fighting against someone who made insistent claims and issued orders. Until one night that voice rose threateningly and irresistibly, demanding that he should bear witness to it with his mouth and with his entrails. And we heard the spirit enter into him as he rose from his bed, tall and growing in prophetic anger, choking with brash words that he emitted like a machine gun. We heard the din of battle and Father’s groans, the groans of a titan with a broken hip, but still capable of wrath. I have never seen an Old Testament prophet, but at the sight of this man stricken by God’s fire, sitting clumsily on an enormous china chamberpot behind a windmill of arms, a screen of desperate wrigglings over which there towered his voice, grown unfamiliar and hard. I understood the divine anger of saintly men.
It was a dialogue as grim as the language of thunder. The jerkings of his arms cut the sky into pieces, and in the cracks there appeared the face of Jehovah swollen with anger and spitting out curses. Without looking, I saw him, the terrible Demiurge, as, resting on darkness as on Sinai, propping his powerful palms on the pelmet of the curtains, he pressed his enormous face against the upper panes of the window which flattened horribly his large fleshy nose.
A short book that contains an entire universe. One of those times where I feel like I’ve found one of the early, root sounds of the music I like.
He seemed to have a dozen hands and twenty senses. His brittle attention wandered to a hundred places at once. No point in space was free from his suspicions.
You can find a shape in here. In a Polish city, a father goes insane. And then his son, the narrator, goes insane. And then the city goes insane, presaged less by the approaching comet in the sky than the father turning his brother-in-law into a doorbell. But it’s all going to be okay. Because perhaps insanity is the only way to live, and to truly appreciate the insane world we live in.
‘Am I to conceal from you,’ he said in a low tone, ‘that my own brother, as a result of a long and incurable illness, has been gradually transformed into a bundle of rubber tubing, and that my poor cousin had to carry him day and night on his cushion, singing to the luckless creature endless lullabies on winter nights? Can there be anything sadder than a human being changed into the rubber tube of an enema?‘
Commentators associate Schulz with Proust and Kafka, but I currently think both of those are lazy. Schulz goes full cosmic. Georg Buchner’s LENZ might be a better touchstone. There have also been comments on the quality of the translation, that Wieniewska simplified the sentences and polished the prose a little too much. I do kind of wonder what a different translation may have wrought, because I do detect an antecedent to Krasznahorkai here, and longer twistier sentences would only have heightened that. But Krasznahorkai is hard to read. Schulz is hard to read too, but in a different way. STREET is a short book that feels like a long one, because each paragraph is so incredibly dense with invention. You have to read and reread and revisit just to be sure you read what you think you read, and to extract all the meanings from it.
The language is stunning.
Each wrinkle of his deeply lined face expressed incredible cunning. In each fold of skin, a missile of irony lay hidden. But occasionally inspiration widened the spirals of his wrinkles and they swelled horribly and sank in silent whorls into the depths of the winter night.
I have saved a lot of pieces of the book, and could quote from it a lot. There is a grand magnificence to the writing, but also a slyness in the way it slips in a dark joke here and there.
THE STREET OF CROCODILES.
