Volume 24, Number 6 · April 14, 1977
Comic Genius
By V.S. Pritchett
The Street of Crocodiles
by Bruno Schulz, translated by Celina Wieniewska, with an introduction by Jerzy Ficowski
Penguin, 160 pp., $3.95 (paper)
The ridiculous or preposterous father is a subject irresistible to the comic genius. The fellow is an involuntary god, and the variety of the species extends over the knockabout and the merely whimsical to the full wonder of incipient myth. To this last superior class the fantastic father invented by Bruno Schulz in The Street of Crocodiles belongs; the richness of the portrait owes everything to its brushwork and to our private knowledge that the deepest roots of the comic are poetic and even metaphysical.
Review, 1529 words
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