The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
Published 1934 · 55,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Magical Realism
How hard is The Street of Crocodiles to read?
The Street of Crocodiles scores 77 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 86 out of 100
- An extraordinarily rich Polish lexicon of botany, textiles, meteorology and anatomy, with metaphors built from technical vocabulary in almost every sentence.
- Sentence structure: 82 out of 100
- Long, accreting sentences that pile subordinate images on one another and often decline to resolve into a main statement.
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- The father's treatises on matter and creation turn the stories into a metaphysics, and even the descriptions argue a position about being.
- Information density: 80 out of 100
- Metaphor arrives at a rate that makes a page slow; almost no sentence is purely functional.
- Narrative indirection: 72 out of 100
- A child narrator reports impossible events in the register of family memoir and never signals which parts are figurative.
- Symbolic density: 90 out of 100
- Tailors' dummies, cinnamon shops, the father's birds and the counterfeit street function as a complete private cosmology.
- Ironic distance: 68 out of 100
- The dignified philosophical register applied to a man turning into a cockroach in a provincial flat holds the book at a permanent comic angle.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- Stories break off, the father's fate is given in several incompatible versions, and no narrative closes.
- Structural complexity: 64 out of 100
- Thirteen loosely connected stories in no fixed chronology, with recurring characters and a season-based rather than plot-based order.
How The Street of Crocodiles is regarded
The Street of Crocodiles holds a literary regard score of 83 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.