Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz

Author(s): Maxim Biller

Short Stories

Do you see what kind of a madhouse this town of Drohobycz is now, Dr Mann? People here never think and act as they should! Locked away in a dimly lit cellar in a provincial Polish town, the writer Bruno Schulz is composing a letter to Thomas Mann, warning him of a sinister impostor who has deceived the gullible inhabitants of Drohobycz. In return, he's hoping that the great writer might help him to escape - from his apocalyptic visions, his bird-brained students, the imminent Nazi invasion, and a sadistic sports mistress called Helena. In Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz, Biller blends biographical fact with surreal fiction to recreate the world as seen through the eyes of one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. The novella is published alongside two short stories by Schulz himself, 'Birds' and 'Cinnamon Shops'. Maxim Biller is a critically acclaimed novelist, short story writer and journalist. He was born in Prague in 1960, but emigrated with his family to Germany in 1970 and now lives in Berlin. He is the author of several story collections - with two stories published in the New Yorker - and two novels, Esra and The Daughter. He is also a columnist for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and Die Zeit, and a recipient of the Theodor Wolff Prize, one of the most prestigious German awards for journalism. Bruno Schulz</strong was a Polish-Jewish writer and artist whose work has influenced numerous major writers, including J. M. Coetzee, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie and David Grossman.

During World War 2, the writer and painter Bruno Schulz was kept from the gas chamber by a Gestapo officer who wanted him to complete a mural for his children’s nursery. One day he was shot in the street by another Gestapo officer while returning to the ghetto with a loaf of bread. In this little book, Maxim Biller imagines a time just before the German invasion of Poland, with Schulz hidden from fear in his cellar and writing a letter to Thomas Mann, imploring his help and warning him that Mann’s sinister double, or at least someone claiming to be Mann, is present in Schulz’s town of Drohobycz, presaging in many ways the coming German invasion. Biller’s Schulz is having trouble concentrating and in making his message to Mann clear, and has to restart many times, each attempt being less successful than the last. The letters are invaded by fears and memories, or the doubles or stand-ins for fears and memories, and it soon becomes unclear which elements belong to the description of Schulz writing, which to the letter he is writing and which exist only in the head of Schulz and not in what he is writing or in the world in which he sits and writes. Even if it all only exists in Schulz’s head, and of course it does (he is alone), this three-fold distinction, or rather the inability (of Schulz and of the reader) to make this three-fold distinction remains. Biller’s text is followed by two of the actual Schulz’s most representative stories, ‘Birds’ (about a melancholic father’s increasing over-identification with birds) and ‘Cinnamon Shops’ (concerning the dissolution of the actual city into one built of dreams and memories as a boy is sent home from the theatre to fetch his father’s wallet). There is certainly something of Kafka in Schultz’s narratorial relinquishment of initiative to a less-than-conscious weight that presses against the text from below (or within (or wherever)), but Schulz has a wistfulness that gives his writing a flavour all of its own.


{THOMAS}


Product Information

Maxim Biller (b. Prague, 1960) is the author of several novels, plays and collections of short stories, whose work has been compared to that of Philip Roth and Woody Allen. He is also a columnist and literary critic at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and Die Zeit. Bruno Schulz, the fictionalised protagonist of this novella, was a Polish-Jewish writer, artist and critic. Born in Drohobych in 1892, he was one of the world's great authors, although a substantial part of his work was lost following his murder by a Gestapo officer in 1942.

General Fields

  • : 9781782271000
  • : Pushkin Press, Limited
  • : Pushkin Press
  • : 0.368
  • : April 2015
  • : 165mm X 120mm
  • : United Kingdom
  • : May 2015
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Maxim Biller
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : 833.914
  • : 96