Customer Reviews

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

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This fiction is like looking out a window at a Las Vegas water show under colored lights: riotious, gorgeous and original. Everything by this Galician Polish Jewish writer/artist is genius.
The title story "The Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass" deals with Schulz's fantastic visit to his deceased father in the afterworld.

In Polish the title literally reads "the Sanitorium beneath the hourglass." However, the term Hourglass (klepsydra) is also used for death notices that are posted on bulletin-boards in public squares. Hence the allusion to a death notice in the title.

A collection of short stories by the acclaimed Polish author killed by the Nazis during World War II. Unrecognized still even after the war, Schulz is in some circles now considered the finest modern Polish-language prose stylist. His stories are dreamlike reflections on life in the modest Jewish quarter of Drohobycz, the town of his birth. Both his fiction and drawings are notable for their erotic tenor and their acute anticipation of the emptiness produced by modern civilization.

Schulz has an ability to make even the most ordinary event revolutionary and poetic. A book transforms into a magical, almost living entity in the young narrator's mind. A look into a friend's stamp collection draws allusions to Alexander the Great's quest for world domination. His descriptions bring life to every minute detail. I only wish I knew Polish to read the original words.

... by not speaking or reading Polish. Even the significance of the "hourglass" in the title of this book is lost on a reader of translations except by way of footnotes. Oh well ...

The translations of Schulz's two small books -- his total surviving oeuvre -- by Celina Wieniewska are available together in a single Penguin edition. I've already reviewed the first half of that edition, "The Street of Crocodiles". Do yourself a big literary favor and get the "complete" works of Schulz forthwith!

And now, into the Sanatorium ...
History is not a parabola, a wave function, a spiral, or any kind of graphable orderly line through Time. Eschatology is as bogus a 'science' as astrology. History is a squiggle. A fractal curlicue. Nobody has ever perceived this truth more clearly than the writers born in the old Habsburg Empire (dear old Kakania): Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Gustav Meyrinck, Joseph Roth, and Bruno Schulz, to name the best of them. Schulz is the most fractally squiggly of all, the most 'liberated' from the illusion of chronology. "Sanatorium" is narrated in a bizarre time-warp of synchronicity; the narrator's Father, the figure who binds all moments together, appears in seemingly random sequence as both dead and alive, present and remembered. Is "Sanatorium" a single narrative, or a series of semi-connected vignettes? The surreal answer is .... both.

"Surreal" is an overused label for literature of fantasy, but it fits Schulz more aptly than most, although "just plain weird" might be yet more apt. Reading Schulz is like walking into a gallery of paintings by Vincent van Gogh. The images are NOT abstract; the objects represented in paint or in words are decidedly ordinary. The viewer/reader knows full well that no colors so bright exist in nature, no angles so sharp can survive the gravity of the quotidian, yet the images are stupendously convincing. More 'real' than 'reality' ... super-real, surreal in the root sense of the invented term.

Here's a sample:
"Afterwards the gardens filled the air with enormous sighs and grew their leaves hastily, working overtime by day and night. All flags hung down heavy and darkened, helplessly pouring out the last streaks of color into the dense aura. Sometimes at the opening of a street someone turned to the sky half a face, like a dark cutout with one frightened and shining eye, and listened to the rumble of space, to the electric silence of passing clouds while the air was cut by the flight of trembling, pointed arrow-sharp, black-and-white swallows."

And another:
"... one day, at a late hour I shall stand on the threshold of these gardens, hand in hand with Bianca. We shall find forgotten corners where between old walls, poisonous plants are growing, where Poe's artificial Edens, full of hemlock, poppies, and convolvuluses glow under the grizzly sky of very old frescoes. We shall wake up the white marble satue sleeping with empty eyes in that marginal world beyond the limits of a wilting afternoon."

The reference to Edgar Allen Poe is revealing, and an anglophone reader might well be reminded also of Hawthorne's finest 'gothic' short story, "Doctor Rappuccini's Garden". But there's an older source for this wellspring of imagination, an "influence" to be sought, I think, a century and some decades father back in the literature of Middle Europe: the fantastic language of E.T.A. Hoffmann. That strand of influence struck me especially because I've just been playing a part in a production of the opera "Tales of Hoffmann", which inspired me to read the original tale called "The Golden Pot". There are too many repeated images in "Sanatorium" and "Pot" to be chance: images of gardens, flowers, birds both caged and free to flee indoors, and salamanders! Flowers and birds might be mere coincidence, but salamanders? Hoffmann's works were immensely popular in the 19th C; unquestionably both Poe and hawthorne were acquainted with them. American readers don't turn to Hoffman much these days, which is their loss; he was a far wittier writer than J.K. Rowling. I'd wager a month's stock dividends, however, that Hoffmann was still wildly popular in Middle Europe when Bruno Schulz was learning to write by reading.

One more sample, and then I'll stop lest I retype the whole dazzling book:
"At last, at the city boundary the night gives up its games, removes its veil, discloses its serious and eternal face. It stops constructing around us illusory labyrinths of hallucination and nightmare and opens wide its starry eternity. The firmament grows into infinity, constellations glow in their splendor in time-hallowed positions, drawing magic figures in the sky as if they wanted to announce something, to proclaim something intimate by their frightening silence. The shimmering of these distant worlds is a silvery starry chatter like the croaking of frogs. The July sky scatters an unbelievable dust of meteors, quietly soaked up by the cosmos."

Wow!