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Tree of Codes

3.91 of 5 stars 3.91 · rating details · 1,959 ratings · 237 reviews

Tree of Codes is a haunting new story by best-selling American writer, Jonathan Safran Foer. With a different die-cut on every page, Tree of Codes explores previously unchartered literary territory. Initially deemed impossible to make, the book is a first — as much a sculptural object as it is a work of masterful storytelling. Tree of Codes is the story of an enormous last...more

Paperback, 139 pages

Published November 8th 2010 by Visual Editions

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Apr 08, 2011 Mon rated it 4 of 5 stars

"...the crowd laughs at the misery which does not know what it is and why it is. The crowd laughs. Do you understand the sadness of comic genius!"

There's a few material aspects of Foer's latest book that I love:

1. cover by gray318 (who also designed Foer's two previous novels)
2. comment on the back by legendary artist Olafur Eliason
3. Text printed on roughly 100gsm ivory matt tone paper, matt card (200gsm?) cover with gorgeous binding

Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye and and ARM's institute of Abori...more

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Dec 01, 2010 Jasmine rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: american

I emailed Karen to put a copy of this book aside for me yesterday. For whatever reason that didn’t work out* because the first floor felt the need to steal every copy, so when I went in greg told me that I could get a copy on the first floor. Anyway, I was up on the 4th floor picking up the books I needed to buy, such as Steve Lowe’s book, last year’s best European, and sadly Kirk Jones’ book hadn’t made it in yet. Anyway after I finished advertising for the bizarre authors I went to the first f...more

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Jan 29, 2012 MJ Nicholls rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: merkins, art-or-illustrated, poems

Re-read 29 Jan 2012

This book is the Princess Diana of precious literature. A dainty little princess, frangible, kind-hearted, captivating . . . but ultimately hollow and deeply uninteresting. Imagine taking Diana out for dinner. She would present herself at your door in a bone-hugging black dress, holding out a dainty hand as you guide her into the limo. You fear too much pressure on her fingers might splinter the bones below, so you tweezer-grip her pinkie, place a gentle thumbnail on her waist...more Re-read 29 Jan 2012

This book is the Princess Diana of precious literature. A dainty little princess, frangible, kind-hearted, captivating . . . but ultimately hollow and deeply uninteresting. Imagine taking Diana out for dinner. She would present herself at your door in a bone-hugging black dress, holding out a dainty hand as you guide her into the limo. You fear too much pressure on her fingers might splinter the bones below, so you tweezer-grip her pinkie, place a gentle thumbnail on her waist to help her inside. Next comes the small talk. Her repertoire of chat is restricted to the corgis’ diet and various pheasants her husband shot the week before, with occasional forays into politics brushed away. “Oh those poor poor people,” she says sometimes, so the driver can hear.

Then dinner. Her hands are too dainty to lift a fork, so her butler helps cut up her swan burger into little cubes. Anything over 3cm gets stuck in her throat and she needs to be drip-fed champagne to help it go down. Meanwhile you pass compliments. “That is a lovely necklace.” She blinks. “Yes. The ambassador of Ghana gave it to me.” Tumbleweeds. The butler scolds you for making conversation. You know she needs to concentrate on eating. Otherwise the food won’t go down for hours! Later on, in the bedroom, Diana sheds her dress by twitching her left shoulder. The bedroom butler, known as the “principality of the penis” will direct your organ into the Princess so her caverns don’t shatter, needing a replacement vagina to be installed from alpaca.

Alright, let’s dispense with Diana. 1) It’s hard to turn the pages. The book has to be held open with two hands, the pages fingertipped lightly to prevent ripping. If read page-by-page, each page has to hang open so the text can be followed. 2) The act of reading distracts from the content. Turning each page causes so much hassle, following the words becomes second to the novelty of turning and ogling the die cuts. 3) The content, the “prose-poem” falls flat. Foer manipulates the text in odd ways, cutting out single lowercase I’s within words—in the text itself the I’s would be inside words beside other letters. 4) Reading this provides no real aesthetic pleasure. 5) It should have been an installation. 6) I love this publisher, but this is a failed vanity project. 7) Thanks and goodnight.
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Aug 23, 2012 Clarry rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: wishlist-to-own

Update - Re-read this piece after reading the original piece that it's based off of, Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles, and love it all the more. He has created a piece of art separate from the original work, while keeping Schulz's beauty in words and phrases. I would highly recommend giving Street of Crocodiles a read and then re-reading this piece, since it gives you a more complete appreciation of the work. I love how the Mother is a more ephemeral figure in this book, while in Street of Cr...more

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Oct 31, 2012 Charlotte rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, favorite

This was a fascinating read. Not only is the work original physically, but what's written inside is just spectacular. Every word was so carefully chosen to create this story. And from every individual sentence such powerful images and ideas came to mind. It was incredible!
This is not only a literary piece, it's also a work of art.
While reading I took notes of the phrases and sentences that spoke to me, or were just beautifully phrased.
This is a definite must-read. You will learn to appreciate li...more

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May 12, 2013 Robin rated it 4 of 5 stars

First, I love the concept and look of this book. I love how fragile and empty--literally-- this book is. As a poet, I've always believed there is meaning in the empty pages, and this book embodies that physically. Second, this is certainly not a novel, and the author acknowledges that in his afterword, so I didn't expect it to be as such and I came at it with different expectations and standards because of that. it was more like an extended poem, and it delivered with some very beautiful, though...more

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Mar 16, 2013 Wesley added it

I'm not giving the book a rating because I didn't read the whole thing, but I wanted to talk about the 30 or so pages I did read, maybe give some curious people a general idea of the book.

There's no denying this book looks awesome. It is definitely a work of art just in the mere printing, cutting words out of the pages, leaving holes and producing pages with less than ten or so words. It's cool to look at and touch. The concept isn't new though. Collage, in the sense of repurposing art, has seen...more

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Dec 27, 2012 Cailin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

I sometimes wonder how I would perceive this book if I had not read Schulz's story beforehand. When I read it, I could not separate myself from the complexity and overall--for lack of a more articulate word--“feeling” which overwhelmed me in The Street of Crocodiles. I’m not sure yet (I feel I must read it a few more times before drawing too many firm conclusions), but it seems that this is part of Foer’s purpose: to maintain the integrity of the original text--to ensure that its essence was not...more

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Nov 13, 2011 Donovan Richards rated it 4 of 5 stars

Mashup: A Musical Joke

Alone in my room on a winter evening a half decade ago or so, I first heard the music genre titled “mashup.” The band, Girl Talk, sampled multiple songs and layered them into a complex and new composition. While enjoyable, mashup never entered the realm of my favorite music. In my opinion, the genre feels too gimmicky. I am certain if I were to go “clubbing,” I would prefer the stylings of mashup to provide the rhythm to my dancing.

But I don’t dance; I don’t “club.” On the...more

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Sep 15, 2011 Anna rated it 3 of 5 stars

I mainly give Tree of Codes this middle of the road rating, not as a testament to the book -- which I feel might actually be too personal of a reading experience to really rate and explain why to others -- but because I feel that it requires more time, more rereading, before I can give it a really thoughtful star or two, one way or the other. It took me about as long to figure out how to read the story as it did for me to actually read the story; somewhat of a unique experience, but one that I f...more

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Aug 10, 2011 Kelly rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, favorites

I have admired Foer for years, and his two previous books are among my very favorite reads. This book is amazing. It reads like liquid poetry (which is a repetitive overkill of a cliched phrase, I'm sure, but it's how I feel after reading this). I read it three times in a row (it only took about 2 hours to do this) because I was so taken with the phrasing. The story behind Foer's writing of this is incredible, and I read excerpts of Street of Crocodiles (read it for free on Google books) because...more

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Aug 06, 2011 Debs rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, visual-treats

The method and reason behind the creation of this work of art is the reasoning behind my giving it fives stars instead of four. I am in awe of what Foer has created; it takes a careful and appreciative artist to pay homage to another person's piece of work through a method of erasure.

At first, I found the piece difficult to read because my eyes kept jumping to phrases or words visible from the other page, but eventually that became part of the wonder; certain unexpected images would emerge just...more

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Aug 02, 2011 J.C. rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, top-10-fiction

I have not decided what is getting kicked off the top ten list but something is definitely getting kicked off the list after reading this, this, amazing thing. Book is not a word appropriate enough.

It can't be described except to call it a literal work of art, not like the writing is so beautiful it reminds one of fine art. No it is actually an art piece, something to be appreciated over and over again, Die Cuts ( I believe this is what this type of book is called)is a foreign concept to me, and...more

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Jun 16, 2011 Jeremiah rated it 4 of 5 stars

I read The Street of Crocodiles after first seeing this book and becoming curious about the source material. I thought it was a beautifully written book, and Foer's description of what happened to Schulz made me incredibly sad that this talent was wiped from the earth.

While reading Tree of Codes, I was struck by how much I was brought back to Schulz's work. The words, the tone, unmistakably controlled by Schulz. If you go into this book expecting an entirely new book, you will not find it, nor d...more

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Apr 03, 2011 Katie Parker rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-fiction

The book is more of a structural piece of art than a piece of fiction. Die-cut from Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles, Foer came up with a completely different story from the original work. And that story was actually rather hard for me to follow. They way the words were chosen and strung together, I felt like I was reading especially eloquent magnetic poetry. That’s not to say that it wasn’t good, but the actual plot is just a little difficult to make sense of due to the highly poetic feel:

"O...more

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Jan 13, 2011 Nicola rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, poetry, gift

It feels fateful that I received this book as a gift on the same week that I finally moved Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions off my to-read shelf (and onto my GTFO-of-my-life shelf), deciding that I am not the type of person who can be bothered wrangling meaning from an epic, free verse poem written from two contradictory perspectives about a time traveller.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes is similarly gimmicky: Foer has cut extraneous material out of his favourite book, Bruno Schulz’s...more

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Dec 06, 2010 Hannah rated it 3 of 5 stars

Where to begin? Well, I've only just finished my first read-through, and I'm sure there will be more (it takes only 30 minutes start to finish), so my thoughts are sort of an "initial reaction." I have loved Jonathan Safran Foer's work, so my expectations for this were very high. The physical book is beautiful. The cut-out pages create a collage of type that simultaneously drew me in and made me feel I wasn't quite smart enough to know how to read it. I figured out that you have to lift each pag...more Where to begin? Well, I've only just finished my first read-through, and I'm sure there will be more (it takes only 30 minutes start to finish), so my thoughts are sort of an "initial reaction." I have loved Jonathan Safran Foer's work, so my expectations for this were very high. The physical book is beautiful. The cut-out pages create a collage of type that simultaneously drew me in and made me feel I wasn't quite smart enough to know how to read it. I figured out that you have to lift each page as you read in order to grasp which words are actually relevant at any given time. However, to call this a story is not entirely accurate. It is prose, but it reads more like awkwardly strung-together poetry than a story. (Again, I may well have a different take after another reading.) The only complete sentences from the author come in the form of a very short - and for me, rather abrupt - epilogue. He briefly explains his idea for the book, his process, and the challenges he encountered. It read like a college essay - this is what I've done so far, this is what I'm trying to do now. I guess I anticipated something more artful, more uniquely intelligent.

The idea of a book as a work of art falls short for me, in the same way that I have never quite grasped "performance art." I see that the reading of the book is as important as the book itself - if we didn't read the words, after all, their value would be nullified - but does the physical lay-out of the words constitute something more than a page of literature? As a musician, I have felt annoyed at performance artists. Music truly exists in real-time. Every performance is unique, and once the performance is done, it can never be duplicated exactly the same. A work of art, or a book, exists in one form. How we perceive it changes constantly - we can look at it from every angle, we can touch it, we can even alter it. So I don't quite understand this need to create something that is more than that - that, in a way, tries to simulate the real-time quality of music.

I have a feeling that my perspective will change after more time spent with the book, but these are my first thoughts. I just wonder, is it enough to be unique?(less)

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Natalie P You don't really elaborate on your views of Performance Art, but I think what you're missing is that many performance artists thrive on the idea that...more You don't really elaborate on your views of Performance Art, but I think what you're missing is that many performance artists thrive on the idea that re-performances will always make a new piece. Re-performance in general is a wildly popular trend in performance art, and even just "Art". Artists since the beginning of time have embraced the idea of "copy as new" as a valid form of artistic expression, Andy Warhol was probably the pinnacle of that movement.

I think the connection you draw between performance art and this book is wonderful connection though, because as you read this book it is like a performance art piece, the original performance being Schulz original story, the first re-performance being Safran Foers experimentation with it, and all of the consequent re-performances being us as readers reading it. When re-read, it has the ability to be re-performed in infinite ways... to constantly change its meaning, and even its writing, in this way it transcends other books... In this way both performance art, and the novel are even more fluid than music.

Music, is more like a lake. The length of the song is settled, the notes are settled, the instruments are even decided on, and they can be varied, but very few musicians will change the lyrics to their songs from performance to performance. Music has boundaries and is contained. While performance art, and i feel this book, are more like meandering rivers... there are just more variables.

Also, in closing, musicians are in control of the way that their music is perceived, as they are put on stage and have a captive audience, where as a book has almost no promise of an audience at all, the reader is the orchestrator of the experience, as you can read one page a day, or the entire book in one sitting, you can read this book 1 page at a time or 4 pages deep at a time, you can read every other word, skip pages, read from end to start ect ect. The same holds true for performance art, as in a gallery there is no captive audience. Some people will stand and look at a painting for 2 seconds, some for 2 hours. Some will walk in on a performance piece 3 minutes before it's over, some will spend a month waiting in line to sit in a chair and stare at Marina Abramovic.

But anyway, there are a lot of holes in my discussion, but I really am glad that you brought up ideas of performance art and time and music. I feel like they are critically important to the way this book gets perceived!

Thanks!(less)
Nov 14, 2011 09:49pm

Dec 05, 2010 Alexandra rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: us

If there were lots of other books made in the same way, I'm not sure that Tree of Codes would have had the same impact - its uniqueness is undoubtedly part of its appeal. I admit I bought it mainly because of its novelty value, and because I'd been given book vouchers. I'm a poor student, and don't usually have a spare £25 to spend on a 134 page paperback! Anyway, I've been showing it to friends whenever they've been in my room, and the general consensus is, "Ooh, this is cool", but today I fina...more If there were lots of other books made in the same way, I'm not sure that Tree of Codes would have had the same impact - its uniqueness is undoubtedly part of its appeal. I admit I bought it mainly because of its novelty value, and because I'd been given book vouchers. I'm a poor student, and don't usually have a spare £25 to spend on a 134 page paperback! Anyway, I've been showing it to friends whenever they've been in my room, and the general consensus is, "Ooh, this is cool", but today I finally stopped showing it off to people, and got round to reading it.

I think it's more successful as an artistic experiment than a literary one. It's fascinating to look at, and I love the fact that it looks so ordinary on the outside, yet becomes something so unlike an ordinary novel as soon as you turn to the first page. The lack of coherent narrative and the huge gaps give it a poetic, elliptical quality, and although it shouldn't really be gripping, I was sufficiently interested to read it in one go. Some sections work better than others - sometimes Safran Foer's editing or "sculpting" makes the sentences seem awkward and nonsensical without really adding anything, but on other pages, it works, and the effect is beautiful. It often gives the impression of seeming profound, although I'm not sure that it's really saying anything meaningful. I didn't find it quite as moving as I'd hoped to, and I definitely wasn't moved to tears like one reviewer I've heard of. Nevertheless, the tone is vaguely unsettling throughout, and some of the more straightforwardly descriptive passages towards the end (which were generally the more successful bits) have stuck in my mind, and will probably prompt me to re-read it at some point in the future.

Overall, I enjoyed it, although I still found the aesthetics more interesting than the content. I'm sure Tree of Codes is a very different book to Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles (the original text), but I'm still not entirely sure if I like the fact that it has Safran Foer's name all over it, while the information about Schulz and the origin of the book is hidden away in the afterword. However, at least Tree of Codes has made me aware of Schulz, and made me interested in reading his work - presumably it will have the same effect for other readers.

Tree of Codes won't make it on to my shelf of favourites, but it's the kind of book I could have written about in all those essays I did on literary theory in my first year at university. It's a shame it wasn't published earlier, as I think I'd have enjoyed using it in essays about authorship, form, intertextuality etc etc. I can see it becoming a popular book to discuss with future generations of English students - perhaps such an obvious choice that it will bore future generations of examiners. Still, although I'm going to read Schulz's book in the hope of finding the emotional resonance that was lacking in Safran Foer, Tree of Codes is still an interesting text in its own right.(less)

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Apr 14, 2013 ThePublishingLab rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: materials-formats

Tree of Codes is a book carved into another book. Jonathan Safran Foer wrote it by eliminating —physically die-cutting— some of the words in Sklepy cynamonowe, a Bruno Schulz book written in 1934. With the remaining words Safran Foer created his own story. Sklepy cynamonowe (literally, “the cinnamon shops”) is a short story collection translated into English as The Street of Crocodiles. This title is also die-cut into Safran Foer’s own, as follows: “the sTREEt OF croCODilEs”.

TreeOfCodes

Although appreciatin...more

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Feb 08, 2011 Adriana Jacobs rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: re-read

I've had Tree of Codes on my night stand for about two months. There's a coffee mug stain on the cover--it's very faint but raised--and I no longer recall if it came with the book. It suits it nonetheless. Let me start with my first impressions:

The copyright page explains succinctly the method that Safran Foer used to create Tree of Codes from Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles (if you haven't read this, do so without further delay). It does not mention--to my disappointment--which transla...more I've had Tree of Codes on my night stand for about two months. There's a coffee mug stain on the cover--it's very faint but raised--and I no longer recall if it came with the book. It suits it nonetheless. Let me start with my first impressions:

The copyright page explains succinctly the method that Safran Foer used to create Tree of Codes from Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles (if you haven't read this, do so without further delay). It does not mention--to my disappointment--which translation was used. Schulz wrote in Polish, so the English translation already represents a kind of excavation of the original. It would have been appropriate to include this information. As other reviewers on Goodreads have noted, it is not readily obvious how one goes about reading the book. The book literally cuts out sentences and words from Schulz's story, and the words and punctuation that remain on each page constitute Safran Foer's tale. But are the pages intended to be read separately or as a palimpsest that gradually unpeels page by page? Answer: the former.

Nonetheless, I found several page/palimpsests to be evocative and meaningful. For example, page 28: "the anger choking to reconcile words." A few pages comprise this line, which I thought was just stunning and so true. I know that feeling so well, of getting stuck on words, even those words that are trying to create a space of healing. I thought of this as I read Tree of Codes, and loved how new spaces were carved out, so to speak, by turning each page. And how some things became clearer when this space was made. It's an interesting process, this unpeeling, how it makes sense of the chaos on the page but also loses something beautiful and significant in the process ("The sky folded itself into blue streaks"). It's the trade off in any translation, I think.

It's easy to take punctuation for granted until it's displaced. In Tree of Codes commas and periods--those little marks indicating connection, pause and breath--hover precipitously over carved out boxes and lines of vanished text, or occur so far from a word that you find yourself breathless. By far, this was my favorite feature of the tale. It required a bit of work to figure out where a sentence began and ended, but it also led at different points to a wonderful confusion:

". We wish. We wish; we want, we want we want-"we are not," he said, "long-term beings. not heroes of romances in many volumes. for one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort. We openly admit: our creations will be temporary.

Now imagine these lines strewn across a page, commas several spaces from a word, both separated by white, rectangular space. This is our wanting, our desires, broken up but also made into gestures. To give each word attention is the desire of poetry, and it's a desire that shapes this tale, strangely enough, the most coherent, I would argue, of Safran Foer's oeuvre.

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Jul 28, 2012 Lily rated it 4 of 5 stars

I read this in one sitting in Shakespeare and Co. It was the coolest idea for a story- he had taken his favorite book, Street of Crocodiles (see Foer's title; clever!) and had cut out almost the whole book, leaving little blurbs, lines, words, phrases, punctuation marks, that when put together became this ephemeral, slightly confusing, poetic, ghost of a story, that I assume is totally different from the original story. It was so cool to read, the actual pages had whole chunks physically xacto k...more

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Apr 30, 2013 Derek Emerson rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013-books-read

Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Tree of Codes, is an unusual work. As opposed to creating a novel from scratch, Foer takes his “favorite book,” The Street of Crocodiles by the Polish-Jewish writer, Bruno Schulz, and cuts away that text to create a new novel.

It is a unique idea and raises the philosophical questions of what makes a novel, what is authorship, and even what is morally acceptable in taking work from others. Foer gives no authorial credit to Schulz, presumably because he sees this as h...more Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Tree of Codes, is an unusual work. As opposed to creating a novel from scratch, Foer takes his “favorite book,” The Street of Crocodiles by the Polish-Jewish writer, Bruno Schulz, and cuts away that text to create a new novel.

It is a unique idea and raises the philosophical questions of what makes a novel, what is authorship, and even what is morally acceptable in taking work from others. Foer gives no authorial credit to Schulz, presumably because he sees this as his own work. This may actually be deconstructionism taken to its logical extreme.

In order to do this, Foer has worked with a publisher (Visual Editions) to present the novel with the full pages, but every page is die-cut to show only the words he has chosen. The result is a book with tree of codes insidemany pages, but few words. As a work of art, it is interesting to see. As a literary work of art, it is an interesting experiment.

But does it work? As a novel, no. The text he has kept is clearly constrained by what is already in the Schulz’s novel, so he is trapped within that structure. He can re-imagine the words in different ways and with different uses, but he cannot escape the structure. As such, he must create a story which can be found within a limited text (if we think of all texts as limited by their scope). He does not succeed in creating a full story.

I struggled with a way to summarize the book (best shot: son sees father’s demise at the hands of his mother), so I went in search of what others say. This was not a scientific survey, but a look at what a good Google search would bring up. Not surprisingly, almost everyone focuses on the physical safran-inside-tablebook or the idea behind the physical book, but not the narrative itself. Why? Because the narrative is not nearly as strong as the idea behind it.

It can be better viewed as a work of poetry, but with lines like “Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness,” it even fails in that category.

This is a book worth looking at, and because it is short, go ahead and read it. But it has been noticed not for what it contains, but how it was created. When the act of creation exceeds the creation, then it says little for the creation itself.(less)

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Oct 09, 2012 Jim Elkins rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: american

This is a tricky book to review. Each page is perforated, die-cut, so you see through parts of it, and read phrases, words, parts of words, and punctuation marks deep into the book. So there's the physical book itself, the thing, which needs to be understood. Then -- a separate issue, and the separation is the problem -- there's the story that can be read on each page, in sequence, as a book is usually read.[return][return]As an object, the book is very attractive. If you flip through the pages...more This is a tricky book to review. Each page is perforated, die-cut, so you see through parts of it, and read phrases, words, parts of words, and punctuation marks deep into the book. So there's the physical book itself, the thing, which needs to be understood. Then -- a separate issue, and the separation is the problem -- there's the story that can be read on each page, in sequence, as a book is usually read.[return][return]As an object, the book is very attractive. If you flip through the pages you see the empty spaces that tunnel down through the book. The edges of the empty pages are filled with words, which sit on little shelves of paper leaning out into the space. You see that each page is constructed as a rectangular frame of paper, made sturdy by five or six horizontal strips. The words and punctuation marks are appended to that framework, like the tabs in an extruded-plastic toy. If you open the book wide, and try to read everything you see, you get an attractive chaos: [return][return]"With secret spring, oneyco [that's part of the word "honeycombed," showing through from a later page] without transition, myself in an even[return]wider, more sumptuous interior[return]my father kept. and his desk a"[return][return]and so forth. (p. 82)[return][return]More could be said about the book as an object. It's intriguing and attractive except for the cover, which is unaccountably a freehand rendering of dots. There would seem to be little reason for freehand painting in a project that is all about geometry, precision, and rectilinear cutting; and dots don't make sense at all, either in relation to the book as an object, or to its title, or to its contents.[return][return]Next is the experience of reading. To actually read the book, you have to hold each individual page up by itself, and fold the other pages back as far as possible. (If you don't hold up one page at a time, then your reading of the sentences on any given page will be hopelessly confused by the appearance of words from other pages.) Because the perfect binding is strong, it is impossible to hold each page straight in front of you, so you end up reading at an angle. It would also be possible to read by slipping a blank sheet of paper behind each page. Either way, reading is artificial, and that artificiality does not seem to be linked to the themes of the book or the physical appearance of the book. Foer and his designers do not seem to have planned reading at the same time they planned the construction of the book itself: an example of the separation of parts that makes this book problematic.[return][return]And then there's the question of content, and that is where "Tree of Codes" becomes especially interesting. The book is presented as a die-cut, redacted version of Bruno Schulz's "Street of Crocodiles." But it's not even necessary to consult Schulz's book to see that's not so, because the words that appear in Foer's book have such capacious white margins around them that they could not have been cut from any actual printed edition of Schulz's book. That is most apparent when it comes to periods and other punctuation, which Foer sometimes leaves isolated on the page, without words around them. They have white space on both sides, in a way that periods don't. [return][return]Consulting copies of the English translation of the book, I conclude that Foer printed out and formatted his own version of the book -- either that, or once he chose the words he wanted to retain, he reformatted the book so they were spaced in ways he liked. For example p. 67 begins:[return][return]"My father kept in his desk a[return][return][return]beautiful map of our city"[return][return]There are two missing lines of text, in Foer's book, between those two redacted lines of text. But the original (in English) is:[return][return]"My father kept in the lower drawer of his desk and old and beautiful map..." [return][return](That is the Penguin Classics edition, for which Foer wrote an Introduction.) So the two cut-out lines in Foer's book are invented. That matters, because it means this is not a redacted version of a book (a physical object) but of a text (Schulz's text).[return][return]And then finally, at the level of meaning, the book becomes very puzzling. If you were to read just this book, and not know anything about Schulz's book, you'd find an evocative, spare, sometimes mystical, often abstract family drama. It is quite different in tone, speed, content, and meaning from Schulz's original. Sometimes Foer picks words that summarize or evoke Schulz's text, so that it seems he is interested in making a purer, less dense version of the original. Other times he changes the emphasis and the meaning of Schulz's writing. As I read, I began to be interested more in what Foer intended readers to think he was doing, than I was in the story he was presenting in his own book. Some examples of those puzzles:[return][return]"Tree of Codes" is made of fragments of "Street of Crocodiles." There are places in "Tree of Codes" where it seems that Foer's interest is in deepening the mysteries that fascinated Schulz -- the idea that meaning can be found in overlooked details, in deepening twilights, in strangely long summers, in abandoned and rooms, in empty hallways and streets, in comets, in patterns and coincidences, and in subtle phenomena that go unnoticed. This is the old-fashioned, late-Romantic Foer, the one involved in Jewish and Central European early modernism, which does not interest me. In context of these practices, the world becomes more mysterious, in a simple sense, when parts of it are missing -- at least that is what would be implied.[return][return]The section called "Street of Crocodiles" in the book of that name describes a street, which in Foer's version turns into a meditation on codes and what they might mean. At some points Foer's intervention becomes self-reflexive, pointing to his book itself, in the way that the "Shem the Penman" passages of "Finnegans Wake" refer to the book itself:[return][return]" The tree of cod es was[return][return][return] better than a paper imitation[return][return][return] ."[return][return]we read on p. 97; in the Penguin edition, p. 72, has[return][return]"The Street of Crocodiles was a concession of our city of modernity and metropolitan corruption. Obviously, we were unable to afford anything better than a paper imitation..."[return][return]Foer's book loses all the politics, the meditations on class and poverty, the specificity of time and place; it substitutes, at times, a placid postmodernism. That's especially hard to understand given Foer's Introduction to Schulz's book in the Penguin edition, and his "Author's Afterword" in this book. In his own book he re-uses some passages from the earlier introduction, including a crucial few lines describing how when he first read it he realized it was a great book, but he also saw that he didn't like it:[return][return]"The language was too heightened, the images too magical and precarious, the yearnings too dire, the sense of loss too palpable--everything was comedy or tragedy."[return][return]Here, by implication, he has worked to make the book into something that he can like as well as love, or love as well as admire. That same line is reframed in the "Author's Afterword" so it becomes part of a myth of origin that he fantasizes lies behind Schulz's book:[return][return]"Often, while working on this book, I had the strong sensation that "The Street of Crocodiles" must have, itself, been the product of a similar act of exhumation." (p. 139)[return][return]Then follows the sentence I quoted, along with some others, but this time not as criticism but as signs that "The sentences feel too unlikely to have been created on purpose." I am assuming Foer doesn't actually believe this: he doesn't think Schulz is an Oulipo-style writer. But then it becomes difficult to understand exactly what his response to Schulz's book is. Is it an attempt to come to terms with an author he admires by reducing him, not only by reformatting his book and cutting out most of his text, but also by pretending that Schulz himself was partly constrained by a similar rule-bound exercise? Or is it an attempt to articulate the deepest "yearnings," the most intense "loss," the purest "tragedy," by excising their cultural contexts?[return][return]I do not mind this vacillation, which it seems to me is the book's real purpose and heart. What I do not like is the way the physical experience of reading, and the visual experiences of looking, looking askance, and looking through, are not linked to these themes of admiration, love, and distaste. The visual and the physical are present in a generic way: the die-cut pages are there in the same form throughout the reading experience, even while the story develops and the resonances with the original change. This inattention to the specifics of the visual is also the case in "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel," in which visual interpolations are largely ignored, or treated as generic images, in the text. All that is disappointing for readers who want to pay the same kind of attention to the visual as to the written. But it is very rare to find a work of fiction that engages the visual in such a concerted fashion, and rare to find a book that takes so long just to begin to describe.(less)

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Sep 12, 2011 Lindy rated it 3 of 5 stars

This was a very unique book, and I liked it for a lot of reasons. First, it was pretty amazing that so many powerful phrases and images could be created through this means--cutting out sections of the text so that you could see through to the pages beyond. I can't imagine the time and effort it took to make this. Plus the visual esthetics were unlike any other book. The only part I didn't like was that the words and sentences didn't line up all that well a lot of the time, so you had to really p...more

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Jun 23, 2011 Svenja rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: other

I was lucky i found this book in our local bookstore after looking for it online for some time now. I just bought it yesterday and i am not sure i have figured it out yet.
I was looking at it all evening yesterday without actually reading it because it looked so amazing and then i started reading it and couldn't, really. I was confused and it took me a while to figure it out. I finally read through it with just reading one page at a time without looking at the pages behind. Which was a short but...more

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Aug 10, 2012 Áine rated it 4 of 5 stars

An entirely new experience of reading, for me: I didn't know how to read it, and read it a few different ways. The meaning of the words
on each page was destabilized by the words peeking through the holes from
the pages that would come later. Each page offered a choice of whether to
invite these other meanings or to hold the page up and focus on only one
layer at a time. Our normal visual training in reading lines of text
doesn't decode this tree of meanings. JSF's decision to cut out the other
words...more

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Dec 23, 2010 Natalie marked it as to-read

Shelves: owned-not-read

My best gal Margaret sent me a copy for Christmas. It's beautiful and fragile.

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Feb 14, 2013 Emma rated it 2 of 5 stars

When I read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close I thought it was extremely gimmicky, and that really influenced how I felt about the novel overall, which was tbh. annoyed. As for this book, the gimmicks are definitely there, but it didn't bother me as much this time. It's hard to say exactly what this book is. It doesn't have a real narrative, but it does have characters. Mainly it's just very poetic. I thought certain passages were quite beautiful, and somehow managed to create something quite...more

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Jan 19, 2012 svnh rated it 3 of 5 stars

I read a very good review of this book, that I will mimic here:

"I mainly give Tree of Codes this middle of the road rating, not as a testament to the book -- which I feel might actually be too personal of a reading experience to really rate and explain why to others -- but because I feel that it requires more time, more rereading, before I can give it a really thoughtful star or two, one way or the other."

Tree of Codes is hypnotic, beautiful & sad, simple and impossible in much the same way...more

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Jan 14, 2011 Karen rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is not a conventional book, but the idea of it was something that I was very interested in and for me the experiment paid off. Foer took his favorite book, Street of Crocodiles, and physically cut out parts to create a new story. So the pages are literally full of holes. I love stuff like this, but I know that other people hate it and find it gimmicky - to each their own.

I have read the original and so I see that what Foer has produces is not really an original story but more a different v...more

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About Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer (born 1977) is an American writer best known for his 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, the novelist Nicole Krauss, and their son, Sasha.

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Everything is Illuminated & Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by Joseph Cornell

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“We are not long-term beings. Not heroes of romances in many volumes. For one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort. We openly admit: our creations will be temporary. We shall have this as our aim: a gesture.” — 30 people liked it

“How beautiful is forgetting! What relief it would be for the world to lose some of its contents.” — 24 people liked it

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