A review by rbreade
The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz

Is it a short story collection or a novel? I now tend to think of it as a novel, though that's a tenuous decision, at best. With Schulz, forget pigeon-holing. He thought of the book as an autobiographical narrative, the unnamed narrator a Schulz stand-in mythologizing the small town of Drogobych--then in southeastern Poland, now in Ukraine by the magic of partition--via the most marvelous language ever caught between the pages of a book. With this complex, Latinate, super-heated language--yes, he locates his narrator-self in the rare-almost-to-unique-viewpoint that combines first person and omniscience--Schulz remakes Drogobych, utterly erasing the boundary between the real and the imagined: the two so interpenetrate that eventually one gives up trying to keep them separate. It's not the plot, it's not the characters--though the mock-heroic, wildly eccentric father commands center stage--it's the language. Schulz is the Prospero of fiction, creating worlds from words.