Instantly striking for its beauty and peculiarity of vision ("sides of meat with their keyboard of ribs swollen with energy" beds "disordered from the weight of dreams", standing "like deep boats waiting to sail into the dank and confusing labyrinths of some dark starless Venice"), its narrative paths are conversely crooked and confounding, leading the reader into neighbourhoods of paradox and uncertainty. Rarely does such a strange work win immediate recognition, but Schulz's writing pulls off the neat trick of being at once direct and arcane. Its publication in December 1933 saw Schulz – a shy, rather awkward schoolteacher – join Stanislaw Witkiewicz and Witold Gombrowicz in the front rank of Polish modernists. Schulz's first book, The Street of Crocodiles (Cinnamon Shops in the Polish original), pursues the same aim, which he called "the mythicisation of reality". These mythical elements are inherent in the region of early childhood fantasies, intuitions, fears and anticipations characteristic of the dawn of life." The Polish Jewish writer Bruno Schulz described Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937), the second of his two surviving collections of stories, as "eliciting the history of a certain family, a certain house in a provincial city – not from documents, events, a study of character or people's destinies – but by a search for the mythical sense, the essential core of that history.
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