A review by wille44
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz

2.5

 It’s difficult to describe and impossible to classify Bruno Shulz’s work.  It’s somewhat surrealist, somewhat stream of consciousness, and a lot of the most distinctive, bizarre, and impactful descriptive prose I’ve ever read.  Sanatorium is a short story collection, with the loose thematic link of European small town and familial life in the early twentieth century.  

Shulz strength lies in his surrealist descriptive work.  His imagery is gorgeous and destabilizing, mundane scenery and behavior is described with a violent, kinetic beauty.  He consistently reframes the ordinary through a lens of frenzied wonder, his prose layering a feverish, unearthly quality over everything that is a complete joy to read. 

The biggest sensation I felt reading Sanatorium was its lack of tether to anything, Shulz writes unanchored by conventional plotting or character progression.  A story about the suffering and loneliness of an old man who lives to collect his pension transforms into a tale about his infantilization as he returns to grade school and gets up to mischief with classmates, and ends with him blowing away into an endless sky on a gust of wind. 

 While I found his surrealist description to be phenomenal, his surrealist characters and their erratic behavior left me a little cold.  Shulz excels in microcosm, one specific scene or interaction or moment will be drawn with near magical insight, turned at just the right off kilter angle to make me totally reevaluate how I see the world or people around me.  Once he animates the scene, his people start moving and talking, one scene flows into another, I become lost.  There is just too little holding even a single short story together for it to really stick with me as a complete work.  

His longest story, Spring, is a good example of this.  The story has sequences of haunting, gorgeous, and truly eye opening moments of spring, and being young in it.  It also has a story made up of non sequiturs, a mythical stamp album that holds the key to reality, a paranoiac love obsession, and wax historical figures brought to life.  Schulz’ prose is strong enough to sweep the reader through his scenes, and they wash over smoothly enough, but looking back there is no thematic or ideological or narrative thread holding anything together.  Maybe it’s simply a perfect evocation of how Schulz experienced one of the Springs in his life, and this is just my own personal preference that tends to veer away from the surreal when it comes to story structure. 

Schulz is a master of imagery and metaphor, and his work is worth reading for this alone.  That being said, I find that in Sanatorium the sum is much weaker than its sparkling parts.