Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz
Maxim Biller
Pushkin Press
Dh70
In Shop Talk, Philip Roth's collection of interviews with fellow authors, there is a literary exchange between Roth and Isaac Bashevis Singer on the Polish writer Bruno Schulz. Roth describes him as "a man of enormous artistic gifts and imaginative riches". Singer offers even higher praise, revealing his first impressions of reading Schulz ("this man writes like Kafka"), followed by an opinion formed from deeper reading ("he's better than Kafka").
Schulz remains criminally under-read. This is due in part to his short output (only two collections of short fiction) and his short life (a senseless, arbitrary death at the hands of a Gestapo officer in 1942). An unfinished novel entitled The Messiah was lost, but his stories were published in his lifetime and have gone on to influence a range of writers from Roth to J M Coetzee.
Another writer spellbound by Schulz is the Prague-born Berlin-based novelist, short-story writer and journalist Maxim Biller. Something of an enfant terrible of German literature (his 2003 novel Esra was banned), Biller has changed direction and decided to evoke rather than provoke with a novella called Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz. This brief but mesmerising work is not only inspired by Schulz, but it also stars him, and shows us both a world about to be turned upside down and a feverish mind about to be pulled inside out by cataclysmic events.
Biller’s premise is bold and bizarre. It is 1938, and from his basement study in a provincial Polish town, “ruined, thin-skinned” Schulz writes a letter to Thomas Mann warning him that a shameless impostor of the German author is deceiving the inhabitants of Drohobycz and wreaking havoc on the streets.
When Mann’s sinister doppelgänger is overheard talking to a stranger and agreeing to compile a list of the names and addresses of all the Jews in town, Schulz suspects he is a Nazi spy and becomes consumed by debilitating fear and paranoia.
This novella is a stunning blend of biography and fiction. The real-life Schulz worked for many years as an art teacher in Drohobycz and so does Biller’s Schulz. His basement walls are covered with his drawings of “distorted, translucent and vulnerable” men, women and animals, all of which seem to be “simultaneously living and dead”. His pupils are not children who do their homework, but birds that perch on rooftops, fly around town and tauntingly scratch and peck on his skylight with their beaks. His persecution complex is exacerbated by a sadistic, hairy-faced sports mistress called Helena and an unshakeable belief that “large black lizards and squinting snakes, as green as kerosene and with evil grins, were about to slither out of the walls around him”.
It is easy to get carried away churning out this kind of fantastical prose, with one surreal conceit begetting another. But Biller, like Schulz, has method in his madness. Coetzee saw in Schulz’s stories “a mystical but coherent idealistic aesthetic” and Biller strives for something similar, giving us oddities with meaning and ramifications, strangeness that highlights a sick mind or palpable foreboding.
That strangeness and foreboding are most keenly felt when Biller tips his tale from dreamscape into nightmare. The “false Thomas Mann” invites guests to his Drohobycz residence, which turns out to be a huge hall with showers fitted into the ceiling. Everyone strips naked, Mann begins whipping men, women and children, metallic blue smoke pours out of the shower jets and when it dissolves the room is full of lifeless bodies.
Biller's novella amounts to barely 50 pages. To pad out the book, and to give readers an idea of where Biller is creatively coming from, publisher Pushkin Press has added two of Schulz's stories from his collection . In Birds, a father turns his house into an aviary but becomes a broken man when his cleaner opens a window and frees them. And in Cinnamon Shops, a wonderstruck boy embarks on a nocturnal magical mystery tour of his town. Both Biller's novella and Schulz's stories are translated by the redoubtable Anthea Bell.
Despite depicting and channelling Schulz, Biller clearly isn’t Schulz. He effortlessly conveys “the joys of unreality” but his prose is deliberately no-nonsense and lacks Schulz’s gorgeous and plangent lyricism. That said, his novella is likely to garner new readers for Schulz and for that we should be thankful.
But what this scintillating and disturbing novella will certainly do is raise the profile of Maxim Biller. Such is the nature of minor miracles: they leave you wanting more.
This book is available on Amazon.
Malcolm Forbes is a freelance essayist and reviewer.
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