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rochellem's review
Got busy with other books but will finish the collection later.
briancrandall's review
5.0
The Book ... Somewhere in earliest childhood, at the first dawn of life, the horizon glowed with its gentle light. It lay in all its glory on Father's desk, while my father, silently immersed in it, patiently rubbed the spine of those decals with a moistened finger until the blank paper began to fog up and become cloudy with blissful anticipation, suddenly shedding scraps of blotting paper to reveal a peacock's eye margin framed with lashes, as my own eyes dropped, half-closing, to a virgin dawn of divine colours, to the wondrous wetness of the purest azures.
[122]
How indifferent I became to all other books!
For ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has its moment, an instant in which it ascends with a scream like a phoenix, all its pages burning. In that one moment, for that one instant, we love them, though even then they are already but ashes. With bitter resignation, we sometimes wander in the late hours through those cool pages, shifting their dead phrases, like rosary beads, with a wooden rattle.
[136]
humdrum_ts's review
challenging
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Diverse cast of characters? No
5.0
It’s reasonable to question the necessity of Nocturnal Apparitions. For roughly the same price, you can find collected single-volume editions of Bruno Schulz’s complete fiction in two separate translations: why pick this up when those options exist? The most obvious reason is the recently rediscovered “Undula,” appearing in its first English collection, though that slight story will appeal mostly to completists. The other big draw is Stanley Bill's new translation, which aims to be more faithful to the original text than Celina Wieniewska and more attentive to flow than Madeline Levine – I can’t confirm the former, but found the latter to be true. Additionally, Nocturnal Apparitions is also a very nice object: a high-quality book that feels good to hold and looks good on a shelf.
Above all though, Bill has done an excellent job picking out interesting throughlines from both Schulz’s original collections while omitting potential redundancies and pain points for beginners (the thinly-disguised lecture of “Mannequins,” the beautiful-but-meandering “Spring”). What’s left is a selection of Schulz’s classic stories of childhood, of an “age of genius” where every object and season is imbued with a life and power of its own. Schulz builds towering fantasies full of dense metaphor, yet never loses sight of the entertaining contrast between these mystical reveries and their completely mundane origins. These same techniques are then used in a handful of surreal, nightmarish stories from the adult perspective, exploring loss, anxiety, and alienation. Time, once treated by Schulz as a living creature given to overflow and excess, becomes a fractured, limited resource that our characters unwisely cling to past its expiry. The way these two styles interact and reflect each other forms encompasses Schulz's unique appeal, and that's kept fully intact here: Nocturnal Apparitions lives up to its goal of providing truly essential stories.* It's a great entry point to the work of a great author.
Above all though, Bill has done an excellent job picking out interesting throughlines from both Schulz’s original collections while omitting potential redundancies and pain points for beginners (the thinly-disguised lecture of “Mannequins,” the beautiful-but-meandering “Spring”). What’s left is a selection of Schulz’s classic stories of childhood, of an “age of genius” where every object and season is imbued with a life and power of its own. Schulz builds towering fantasies full of dense metaphor, yet never loses sight of the entertaining contrast between these mystical reveries and their completely mundane origins. These same techniques are then used in a handful of surreal, nightmarish stories from the adult perspective, exploring loss, anxiety, and alienation. Time, once treated by Schulz as a living creature given to overflow and excess, becomes a fractured, limited resource that our characters unwisely cling to past its expiry. The way these two styles interact and reflect each other forms encompasses Schulz's unique appeal, and that's kept fully intact here: Nocturnal Apparitions lives up to its goal of providing truly essential stories.* It's a great entry point to the work of a great author.
* - The book's listed description is incorrect: “Pan” and “A July Night” are not included, replaced (correctly, in my opinion) by “Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass.”
storybookvisitor's review
I couldn't get into the story. The prose is beautiful but I found it hard to follow
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