Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is the English title of Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą, a novel by the Polish writer and painter Bruno Schulz, published in 1937.

Related Topics:
English - Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą - Novel - Polish - Bruno Schulz - 1937

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The novel takes the form of a collection of dreamlike, poetic short stories that reflect on the death of the narrator's father, as well as life in the modest Jewish quarter of Drohobycz, the provincial town in the Austro-Hungarian Empire where Schulz was born. The hourglass of the title refers to the use of this object as a symbol in obituaries and death notices among the Poles.

Related Topics:
Drohobycz - Austro-Hungarian Empire

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"The books we read in childhood don't exist anymore; they sailed off with the wind, leaving bare skeletons behind," Schulz wrote in to a friend in 1936. "Whoever still has in him the memory and marrow of childhood should rewrite these books as he experienced them." This was the foundation of his creative project, and he realized it most vividly in a story called simply "The Book," which opens the novel. The story's narrator recalls a volume whose pages, when rubbed, reveal fragments of kaleidoscopic color and the collective memory of an entire people.

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Like prose poems, the stories that make up the novel work not through conventional structures of plot or character, but by building up a body of images that create their own logic. Their anthropomorphism can be dizzying. "Now the windows, blinded by the glare of the empty square, had fallen asleep," Schulz writes in "August." "The balconies declared their emptiness to heaven; the open doorways smelt of coolness and wine." In "Birds," we are told, "The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year's loaves." Then Schulz prods the simile just a bit further than expected: "One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference." The sensuality that characterizes Schulz's language is rooted in the Polish poetic tradition, but the surreal and grotesque tweaks are his own.

Related Topics:
Plot - Character - Anthropomorphism

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"Father's Last Escape," the concluding story of the novel, Schulz makes an explicit reference to Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (Schulz translated Kafka into Polish). The old man's business has been liquidated and all his functions and authorities taken over by wife or relatives. Even the pretty, young Polish maid Adela has gone and been replaced by Genya, "anemic, pale, and boneless,?and so absent-minded that she sometimes made a white sauce from old letters and invoices." Father's response is to turn himself first into wallpaper, then a piece of clothing, and finally into a big crablike insect who ? unlike Kafka's passive victim ? runs around the house, searching endlessly for something. His wife can catch the creature in her handkerchief sometimes, but cannot hold him. One day, however, she must have managed because Father appears at lunch, as the main course, after which he escapes the table, never to be seen again.

Related Topics:
Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis

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