Here's Laura's summary of last night's reading group:

We then moved on to this month's book, "The Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno Schulz. Opinions on this book ran the gamut of "loved it" to "hated it" with almost every shade in between also represented. Those who loved or liked it found it richly imaginative, original, and beautifully written - almost more of a painting than a piece of writing - almost "prose poetry." Those who disliked or hated it found it too disjointed - not just from vignette to vignette but even at times from paragraph to paragraph. The frequent lack of a typical going-from-point-A-to-point-B structure really bothered some folks, while others saw the digression from A to C without ever getting to B as a pleasant diversion off the path with no need to get to really ever get to B. (Okay - does that make sense to anyone who wasn't at the meeting???) Some members felt that if they had taken one vignette and read it by itself they would have thought it wonderful, but that the collection was too much of the same over and over again and accentuated the book's disjointed nature. We also spent a lot of the discussion talking about the author's background (a few members had read extra-curricular biographical material about him).

That pretty well sums it up, I'm always amazed at how much some of the reading group members can talk about a book that has so little in the way of plot, characterization, theme, structure, you name it. It really was a short story collections, with the stories mostly about the same characters, but they weren't different enough to succeed as a collection and too different to really come together as a coherent novel. It was fine to read, and mercifully short, but I got the feeling by this weekend I won't remember anything about it. While Laura thought that it was okay because it was only 160 pages and not any longer, I thought maybe it would have been better served by having gone one for at least a little more, in the hope of bringing some common theme or whatever together. Part of the appeal seems to be that he wrote these stories in a vacuum, not really for publication, without any formal literary background, making them sort of a primitivist attempt at Eastern European literature. Even Roger liked them, and of course Evan was championing them, although he was getting rather desperate as the evening wore on. The bigger story is that the reading group celebrated its 10-year anniversary last night. I'll try to give a little history lesson tomorrow.