One day, however, she must have managed because Father appears at lunch, as the main course, after which he escapes the table, never to be seen again. The stories in these pages comprise all the surviving fiction. His wife can catch the creature in her handkerchief sometimes, but cannot hold him. Fictions of Bruno Schulz: The Street of Crocodiles & Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Even the pretty, young Polish maid Adela has gone and been replaced by Genya, "anemic, pale, and boneless,…and so absent-minded that she sometimes made a white sauce from old letters and invoices." Father's response is to turn himself first into wallpaper, then a piece of clothing, and finally into a big crablike insect who - unlike Kafka's passive victim - runs around the house, searching endlessly for something. The old man's business has been liquidated and all his functions and authorities taken over by wife or relatives. "Father's Last Escape," the concluding story of the novel, Schulz makes an explicit reference to Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (Schulz helped his one-time fiancee translate Kafka's The Trial into Polish, a translation for which Schulz provided an introduction).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |