Summary
Bruno Schulz: Cinnamon Shops
"Cinnamon Shops" (Sklepy cynamonowe, 1934), the first, autobiographical collection of short stories by Polish writer Bruno Schulz, is considered one of the greatest achievements of Polish and European prose between the two world wars, and the 20th century in general.
In "Cinnamon Shops", as the author himself states, "an attempt is made to reconstruct the history of a of a family, of a house in the province - not from its real elements, events, characters or true destinies, but exploring the mythical content above them, the ultimate meaning of that history". In the foreground of this "book of childhood", home and city, is the figure of the father, realistically - a cloth merchant, but mythically - a "heresy" and a "demiurge" of the world created from kitsch. Schulz's world is grotesque, but not Kafkaesque, but open and bright, like which is a cheerful act of illumination that is summoned from the threshold of a boy's initiation into the world of adult knowledge.
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