The Street of Crocodiles

In the provincial Galician town of his childhood, the narrator conjures a dreamlike, autobiographical world around his eccentric father, a textile merchant whose shop and mind decay into ever more fantastical metamorphoses. Schulz roots his hallucinatory prose in the real Drohobycz: the cinnamon-scented family house, the father's cloth shop on the market square, the town's ancient heart, and the shabby, garish new commercial district he calls the Street of Crocodiles.

The father

The family house

The cinnamon rooms

In the shadowy, cinnamon-scented rooms of the family house, the narrator's father presides over a private universe, keeping birds in the attic, lecturing on the secret life of matter, slowly withdrawing from the ordinary world. Schulz makes the house a place where time thickens and objects come alive, the enchanted centre of his whole mythologised childhood.

The opening stories

inspired by The narrator's family house, the cinnamon-scented rooms of his childhood, is drawn from Schulz's own home in Drohobycz; sited in the town.

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