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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 day of life — as one character's life is chased to extinction, Foer multi-layers the story with immense, anxious, at times disorientating imagery, crossing both a sense of time and place, making the story of one person’s last day everyone’s story. Inspired to exhume a new story from an existing text, Jonathan Safran Foer has taken his "favorite" book, The Street of Crocodiles by Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, and used it as a canvas, cutting into and out of the pages, to arrive at an original new story told in Jonathan Safran Foer's own acclaimed voice.
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First published November 8, 2010
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About the author
Jonathan Safran Foer
76 books14.4k followersJonathan Safran Foer is the author of two bestselling, award-winning novels, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and a bestselling work of nonfiction, Eating Animals. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 456 reviews
January 29, 2012
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.
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.
April 9, 2011
"...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 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (Villa Savoye in black, get it?)
I have never read Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles, which Tree of Codes is sort of an 'adaptation' of. The latter is technically Street of Crocodiles with selected phrases and sentences cut out, and with no added material. Tree of Codes is literally an abstraction of Street of Crocodiles:
Street of Crocodiles = _tree_ of ___cod__es.
It must have been a very personal 'homage' (Schulz's book being one of Foer's favourite) as an artist, appropriating a text that has no particular reputation. Why then did Foer choose to work exclusively with this one book? He could have mixed in his own writing and I wouldn't have noticed, or mind.
It is an extremely restrictive process and I'm not sure how well he controlled it - if he wanted to time the story's pace and pauses, then surely he would have compromised the coherency of the text, and if he wanted to concentrate on the structure, he would also have to keep in mind how some words couldn't be use in isolation because of the cutting, not to mention they have to be in the same linear order. As conceptual art this wouldn't matter because it is a commonly practiced method. Artists explore and discover new meanings within an original by deconstructing, fragmenting and reassembling it, it's as old as Picasso's collages. However, I feel as though Foer wanted us to understand the story logically as well as instinctively on an artistic level. He has put so much effort into stringing disjointed words and phrases to create comprehensible sentences - he wanted to make art AND write a story at the same time, and it would have been phenomenal if he succeeded.
My tutor in art school once said, 'This is your art, make up your own rules. After that, don't stick to them.' Your process it only there to serve your final product because to your audience/reader, little else matters. Foes has stuck to his own 'rules' perhaps too unconditionally, and the narrative suffers as a result.
But hey, the physical book is still beautiful, so at least it's worth the money to put on the shelf. It reminded me again of the joy of reading a new book that has the cover attached and not stamped with 'property of some obnoxious library' every other page.
August 15, 2016
I skimmed several dozen Goodreads reviews of this book and it would seem this book is incredibly divisive, in a way. You either seriously despise this book as pretentious and gimmicky and pomo (which I think are the three most used words in the hater reviews) or you think it is brilliant. Usually the battle lines are drawn in terms of whether you hate or love Foer’s work. I have to say I did not want to read it because I have not been able to finish either of Foer’s wildly popular novels, so that makes me not a fan, but my good friend Greg—who of course loved it—urged me to check it out. So you can see I was already divided about it.
Then I had just read the book on which it was based, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, a book I really liked very much. I see Schulz as one of The Greats in Serious Fiction of the Twentieth Century. There is ecstatic language in Crocodiles, in wildly surreal and sad stories that would seem to focus on the psychological/actual disappearance/death of Schulz’s (or the narrator of what I understand to be his autobiographical fiction) father. Crocodiles is Foer’s favorite novel of all time, he also loves the language, but I was really worried what he would do to the book in his “analysis” of it through his own work of art. The novel is great, why ruin it?
So what is The Tree of Codes? Foer creates a die-cut book from Schulz’s Crocodiles. In other words, it is a book of erasure--perfect for a book about a disappearing father—where he actually cuts out most of the words from Crocodiles to make his own book of, what is it. . . fiction? Poetry? Literary criticism? All of the above, I’d say. But the artifact you are left with is a book with writing on only one side of a page with words literally cut out. If you’ve never seen anything like this before, it is visually interesting, and visceral: The book is a piece of art.
This is where “gimmick” comes in, I guess. “Erasure” or what used to be called “found” poetry is an established literary strategy, one that has been around for decades. It is akin to (musical) sampling, I guess, in that it draws on or samples another’s work. As a teacher of (creative) writing, I have assigned erasure or found poetry projects to students for years. Gimmick? I think of it like any form, as a strategy for creation. And as literary criticism or homage, it is also like what any critic would do, focusing on certain words to “interpret” a writer’s work, though lit crit is not primarily what Foer intends.
Postmodern? Well, I guess it is, yep. It’s sort of a reflection on where stories and poems come from. Foer posits that the words in Crocodiles come from a “tree of life” or ur-language codes, so that its surreal effects—which of course like all stories leave all sorts of things out—are not unlike Foer’s own work drawn from Schulz’s.
Pretentious? Well, you say tomato. . . I guess all work like this could be described that way. It’s like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, it’s like Calvino’s On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, it’s meta-fiction, it ‘s a commentary on the nature of storytelling as well as a story.
And what is the effect? The Tree of Codes is a palimpsest of Schulz’s book, an inverse archaeological site of his novel. You still get Schulz’s gorgeous, sumptuous language, only highly selected, of course, to focus on father and mother and sad disappearance. I guess having read it through a few times it would appear to be about the last day in the life of a man.
It’s pretty beautiful, and a little bit of work to read, it has all these (actual) layers you need to sift through. It’s an homage, it’s a work of art based on a work of art. Okay, screw it, I’m choosing a side in this one: I liked it a lot. And I liked the idea of it a lot more than the actual story or prose poem or poetic fiction Foer comes up with, but I also like what he comes up with. It’s not just random.
And my liking it is in spite of my not yet warming to Foer as artist. Now it actually makes me want to dig out my copy of Everything is Illuminated and try it again. But just having read Schulz, I also think: Son, I know Schulz, and you are no Schulz. But I guess that might partly be the point. We who write are always drawing from the language of others, we are “all influence” or what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia, there is nothing new under the sun, all stories are derived from stories that are derived from stories.
Especially if you are a writer, you are always influenced by and rewriting in a sense your own favorite writers’s works. By writing this Foer is definitely telling you to read His favorite writer, Schulz, because Schulz is great , AND to write your own stories and poetry and literary criticism, drawing from your own favorite works. If you see it this way, the story of the last day of the guy in Foer’s story is everyone’s story.
Then I had just read the book on which it was based, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, a book I really liked very much. I see Schulz as one of The Greats in Serious Fiction of the Twentieth Century. There is ecstatic language in Crocodiles, in wildly surreal and sad stories that would seem to focus on the psychological/actual disappearance/death of Schulz’s (or the narrator of what I understand to be his autobiographical fiction) father. Crocodiles is Foer’s favorite novel of all time, he also loves the language, but I was really worried what he would do to the book in his “analysis” of it through his own work of art. The novel is great, why ruin it?
So what is The Tree of Codes? Foer creates a die-cut book from Schulz’s Crocodiles. In other words, it is a book of erasure--perfect for a book about a disappearing father—where he actually cuts out most of the words from Crocodiles to make his own book of, what is it. . . fiction? Poetry? Literary criticism? All of the above, I’d say. But the artifact you are left with is a book with writing on only one side of a page with words literally cut out. If you’ve never seen anything like this before, it is visually interesting, and visceral: The book is a piece of art.
This is where “gimmick” comes in, I guess. “Erasure” or what used to be called “found” poetry is an established literary strategy, one that has been around for decades. It is akin to (musical) sampling, I guess, in that it draws on or samples another’s work. As a teacher of (creative) writing, I have assigned erasure or found poetry projects to students for years. Gimmick? I think of it like any form, as a strategy for creation. And as literary criticism or homage, it is also like what any critic would do, focusing on certain words to “interpret” a writer’s work, though lit crit is not primarily what Foer intends.
Postmodern? Well, I guess it is, yep. It’s sort of a reflection on where stories and poems come from. Foer posits that the words in Crocodiles come from a “tree of life” or ur-language codes, so that its surreal effects—which of course like all stories leave all sorts of things out—are not unlike Foer’s own work drawn from Schulz’s.
Pretentious? Well, you say tomato. . . I guess all work like this could be described that way. It’s like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, it’s like Calvino’s On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, it’s meta-fiction, it ‘s a commentary on the nature of storytelling as well as a story.
And what is the effect? The Tree of Codes is a palimpsest of Schulz’s book, an inverse archaeological site of his novel. You still get Schulz’s gorgeous, sumptuous language, only highly selected, of course, to focus on father and mother and sad disappearance. I guess having read it through a few times it would appear to be about the last day in the life of a man.
It’s pretty beautiful, and a little bit of work to read, it has all these (actual) layers you need to sift through. It’s an homage, it’s a work of art based on a work of art. Okay, screw it, I’m choosing a side in this one: I liked it a lot. And I liked the idea of it a lot more than the actual story or prose poem or poetic fiction Foer comes up with, but I also like what he comes up with. It’s not just random.
And my liking it is in spite of my not yet warming to Foer as artist. Now it actually makes me want to dig out my copy of Everything is Illuminated and try it again. But just having read Schulz, I also think: Son, I know Schulz, and you are no Schulz. But I guess that might partly be the point. We who write are always drawing from the language of others, we are “all influence” or what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia, there is nothing new under the sun, all stories are derived from stories that are derived from stories.
Especially if you are a writer, you are always influenced by and rewriting in a sense your own favorite writers’s works. By writing this Foer is definitely telling you to read His favorite writer, Schulz, because Schulz is great , AND to write your own stories and poetry and literary criticism, drawing from your own favorite works. If you see it this way, the story of the last day of the guy in Foer’s story is everyone’s story.
April 14, 2015
Someone dead and marginally famous once said, The surest form of flattery is to take your favorite book by an author and scissor it to shreds, until the resulting carnage forms an elaborate meshing of brittle die cuts that, if carefully fingered through, convey in amputated words, phrases and punctuation, something like a prose poem. And that’s exactly what happened to Bruno Schulz’s collection of short stories, Street of Crocodiles, when pseudo-literary savant Jonathan Safran Foer—famous for his nauseating and wildly-successful novels of pop-experimentalism, Everything is Ingratiating and Extremely Cloying and Incredibly Lame—decided he wanted to make a pretty and precious vanity project out of the deceased author’s avant-garde story cycle about a merchant family.
My obviously snarky tone aside, I honestly didn’t dislike this book as much as I thought I would. Mostly I’m ambivalent about the reading experience—if this were a third-grade art class, and I were the teacher, then I’d pat Jonathan on the shoulder, tell him, “that’s nice,” and move on to look at the next tyke’s crayon drawing of a T-Rex high-fiving a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle atop an inaccurately colored rainbow. It would be a long and generous stretch to say that Foer has formed anything resembling a coherent and realized narrative out of this particular arts-and-crafts project, but the occasional pleasant turn of phrase makes for a nice reprieve from the constant worry of tearing a page.
As always, I can’t help but equate Foer as the literary equivalent of a more-educated yet less-talented Daniel Johnston, with his “Gee-Wiz” but hollow sentiments about life and love and aches and woes. To this day I am flabbergasted at the fact that Foer has done as well as he has as an author and that people slobber over his books like a teenage crush. I know Foer’s Creative Writing teacher in college, Joyce Carol Oates, had a lot to do with the early hype about his first novel, but after having read the following article:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/if-y...
...it makes me wonder about how Foer earned such acclaim from Oates…what did you do, Jonathan? WHAT DID YOU DO!
My obviously snarky tone aside, I honestly didn’t dislike this book as much as I thought I would. Mostly I’m ambivalent about the reading experience—if this were a third-grade art class, and I were the teacher, then I’d pat Jonathan on the shoulder, tell him, “that’s nice,” and move on to look at the next tyke’s crayon drawing of a T-Rex high-fiving a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle atop an inaccurately colored rainbow. It would be a long and generous stretch to say that Foer has formed anything resembling a coherent and realized narrative out of this particular arts-and-crafts project, but the occasional pleasant turn of phrase makes for a nice reprieve from the constant worry of tearing a page.
As always, I can’t help but equate Foer as the literary equivalent of a more-educated yet less-talented Daniel Johnston, with his “Gee-Wiz” but hollow sentiments about life and love and aches and woes. To this day I am flabbergasted at the fact that Foer has done as well as he has as an author and that people slobber over his books like a teenage crush. I know Foer’s Creative Writing teacher in college, Joyce Carol Oates, had a lot to do with the early hype about his first novel, but after having read the following article:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/if-y...
...it makes me wonder about how Foer earned such acclaim from Oates…what did you do, Jonathan? WHAT DID YOU DO!
November 4, 2019
As a story, this does not work.
As a sculptural object, it is a wonderful thing.
If you are planning on "reading it on your kindle", good luck! The book is a paper-cut collage, making a fragile text out of elaborately cut pages, where text has been removed from The Street of Crocodiles and the gaps and holes allow sentences and fragments to shine through and create new text.
I love the idea but find little literary value in it. My suggestion would be to read the original text of The Street of Crocodiles and engage in a collage class to cut out texts and letters from other books with less artistic value. Maybe that would be a way to finally make sense of The Alchemist, cutting out all the nonsense? But no, that is art going too far in its minimalistic approach, I guess...
Interesting as an experiment, nice to touch and feel. Not necessary as reading material.
As a sculptural object, it is a wonderful thing.
If you are planning on "reading it on your kindle", good luck! The book is a paper-cut collage, making a fragile text out of elaborately cut pages, where text has been removed from The Street of Crocodiles and the gaps and holes allow sentences and fragments to shine through and create new text.
I love the idea but find little literary value in it. My suggestion would be to read the original text of The Street of Crocodiles and engage in a collage class to cut out texts and letters from other books with less artistic value. Maybe that would be a way to finally make sense of The Alchemist, cutting out all the nonsense? But no, that is art going too far in its minimalistic approach, I guess...
Interesting as an experiment, nice to touch and feel. Not necessary as reading material.
December 2, 2010
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 floor of the store I work at and get lectures from 2 Toms at the same time about how much I didn’t want this book. There are so many better books, it has no substance**. This devolved into 2 conversations. First Cash Tom (Yeah I don’t really know his last name) was telling me about all these medical textbooks people cut up as art projects, and he googled them, they are super cool. Then Tom F and I proceeded to get into a discussion about our disagreement about at what age authors begin or end being worth reading. I don’t know Tom that well but I think that we probably both tend to skirt the lines and hang out in enemy territory. However, I clearly informed him that I only read authors who know how to use the internet, and he informed me that he pays his bills on the internet. I understand this, because I am still unclear about how you would even go about paying bills through the actual mail. We did come to a conclusion (not unlike similar conversations I’ve had with greg although he puts his boundaries in different places), that tom likes his authors to be over 40, while I like mine substantially under that if possible, if not earlier books tend to be better for me (although I do think imperial bedrooms is leaps and bounds above less than zero). A lot of these things come down to the manners in which attention works in different generations. In younger generations attention has been created by things like cable television and internet to be both wider and more focused. Have you ever seen a five year old play a video game, or a 20 year old for that matter.
I am a huge fan of rock band as everyone knows as is my best friend. But we interface with the game in completely different ways. For those who don’t know*** the rock band screen consists of several layered elements. The background is a filming of a computer generated concert using characters you’ve created, the foreground is 1 to 5(or 7 I’m not clear how the big numbers work in rock band 3) tracks that the players need to keep up with, each player gets their own track. In addition you have a crowd meter (which is like a life bar), star rankings, spade rankings, multipliers, an overdrive bar, a streak bar, double charge areas, I mean I think you are getting the point the game is totally fucking add. But I would argue directed towards a kind of add that my cog neuro professor actually says isn’t add just looks like it. He calls it over focusing, yeah that is exactly what it sounds like. To be successful in rock band you have to be able to completely focus on your track, but then keep tabs on all the other bars on the sidelines. I can be more specific about this if people need rock band advice but let’s call it a 90/10 split of attention. I can do this, my best friend isn’t nearly as good at it. I’m the one that says why the fuck are we getting a close up of your characters boobs, she responds what are you talking about. Basically what I’m saying is there is an ability to over focus on one thing, but to separate attention to horizontally cover everything else going on (as opposed to vertical processing which has to process one item at a time in a specific order). Everyone can do both to some level, but because of the layout of the internet the younger generations are more practiced at horizontal reasoning, and because use stops neurons from dying are better at it.
[pause]
I am now going to start talking about the book, so a few disclaimers:
For the 85% of my friends that hate Foer (but not quite so much as they hate eggers) I am about to say some very nice things.
For the people out there that want to talk about poor gimmicks, this is not a good review for you.
For the people that think Foer didn’t go far enough with his gimmick because he wanted to get rich. He is already rich, get over it.
[/pause]
This book was created for those people who can split attention. The book is not meant to be read through the pages so much as experienced through the pages and read in order. It is important for the reader to have a relatively high memory span**** to enjoy this book.
What I mean here is that to enjoy this book it is very important to be able to focus on the words in the order that they go in and to keep them in mind until you are able to create a sensible line. This takes a bit of getting use to and some memory capacity. If you just open the book to a page and look at every word you see you aren’t going to get a story, you are just going to be confused. To get the story read in order. I know I keep saying this but I can’t stress this enough.
Reading without reading ahead is extremely difficult because you can see the next twenty pages, or parts of them through the book. On one hand this is totally awesome. On the other you kind of want to shove a piece of paper between the pages so you can read in peace. DON’T! Because here is the thing, if he wanted you to do that, he could have smushed all he words together and made it a short story. I hear you, “Not if he wanted to charge 40 dollars for it.” You know Foer wrote the words to book of photography, he could have done that here and charged more, but he didn’t. He says in multiple locations he wanted to make a die-cut for years. And the thing is if you can balance attention correctly it really comes across what makes this book truly special.
The pages are printed on one side only, when you turn a page, that moment, that thought you just lived through it’s gone. This is a really powerful idea. I mean yes you can say, he had to do that, the page cutting, the word forced it. That might be true but that doesn’t change the experience of reading it. When you think of those old children’s books where the illustrations had wax paper on both sides, or in the wrong place in the book, those were printing issues but it didn’t make them less special. I think this although I won’t ever know if it was just about printing isn’t so different.
But while the past is gone the future still lies ahead of you.
[pause]
Wait, I have to talk about plot for a second before I go on. This book to me isn’t unlike Legend of a suicide it’s a book about how people die, and when people die they don’t just die in one way and they don’t just die by themselves. They die for years before they actually die, and they start to kill those around them. But the book is also about hope about how even in the darkest places it is possible for the light to sneak in and trip us up to force us out of our depression. As steve martin says, “you can't play a sad song on the banjo.” This book is about how life cycles, how there are ups and downs but how ultimately we end up well, let’s just say we end up, you’ll have to read the book to have a better idea.
[/pause]
This book contains really intense moments of sadness and loss and in these moments the future looks different. There seems to be less words on the pages, there doesn’t seem to be many words down the road. I don’t know if this is a change in perception that comes along with the hopelessness, or if it is an actual design element of the book. But I think the fact that the book is able to invoke that feeling is important no matter which it actually is. The fact that the book is able to attach itself, embed itself, and make you notice these things is important. But if you can’t focus on more than the word you are reading you miss these waves. It is so important in reading this to direct attention in multiple directions.
In addition to noticing the numbers of words that occur on subsequent pages, I at least picked out specific words that occurred on subsequent pages while I read. I would be reading along and notice I was coming up on shame or father, or whatever else, and it feels a lot like life I think that nothing is ever as simple as what is simply occurring in the moment but so much occurs around it.
[pause]
You see this in the plot as well, when ideas and feeling tend to cycle
[/pause]
A lot of these sort of words tend to emphasize the theme of the story which seems to be a profound and fundamental loss. The emotions tend to bleed through from future pages giving them time to really percolate and develop before you get to the moment that they actually occur. This helps to make the story a lot stronger I think.
A last note that I think Foer says better than I could:
“I could not help but feel that Schulz’s hand must have been forced, that there must have existed some yet larger book from which the street of crocodiles was taken.
It is from this imagined larger book, this ultimate book, that every word ever written, spoken or hought is ever exhumed. The book of life is the temple that our lives strive to enter, but instead only conjure.”
Fiction is about trying to take the word we have and shape them into our human experience and that can’t always be done simply as black and white word on a page. Sometimes that gimmick that difference brings us one step closer to truth. And yeah as a rule I hate found text, but this is not so much found text as found life. I haven’t read the original, but I will, but I don’t think the fact that an original exists take away from what has been achieved here.
Reading this I couldn’t help but think of DFW (for obvious reasons) but not of what you think, I thought of This is Water. And coming out of this book as profoundly sad as I found it, I couldn’t help but think, “God the water’s nice over here.”
*Imagine how sad it would have been if I couldn’t get a copy I mean the damn book is on backorder now I would have cried.
**hilariously Mr. Fuller actually said “It has no gimmick” but when I corrected him he realized what he actually meant.
***Karen
****Okay memory span is a reference to a psychological test where you read sentences and you have to remember the last word of each sentence and repeat them back to the interview after reading like 5 sentences. People who read quickly tend to have high memory spans. Basically we are talking working memory levels. This is not the same as short term memory, it is shorter term and it is memory that is currently in use. The parts of the working memory that aren’t in use fade gradually unless they become re-primed before they fade out of memory. I could go on, but again relevance.
*************************************************
I read this book twice today once on the train and once at home.
Before:
OMG OMG OMG OMG
I've died and gone to gimmick heaven.
WANT WANT WANT WANT
I am a huge fan of rock band as everyone knows as is my best friend. But we interface with the game in completely different ways. For those who don’t know*** the rock band screen consists of several layered elements. The background is a filming of a computer generated concert using characters you’ve created, the foreground is 1 to 5(or 7 I’m not clear how the big numbers work in rock band 3) tracks that the players need to keep up with, each player gets their own track. In addition you have a crowd meter (which is like a life bar), star rankings, spade rankings, multipliers, an overdrive bar, a streak bar, double charge areas, I mean I think you are getting the point the game is totally fucking add. But I would argue directed towards a kind of add that my cog neuro professor actually says isn’t add just looks like it. He calls it over focusing, yeah that is exactly what it sounds like. To be successful in rock band you have to be able to completely focus on your track, but then keep tabs on all the other bars on the sidelines. I can be more specific about this if people need rock band advice but let’s call it a 90/10 split of attention. I can do this, my best friend isn’t nearly as good at it. I’m the one that says why the fuck are we getting a close up of your characters boobs, she responds what are you talking about. Basically what I’m saying is there is an ability to over focus on one thing, but to separate attention to horizontally cover everything else going on (as opposed to vertical processing which has to process one item at a time in a specific order). Everyone can do both to some level, but because of the layout of the internet the younger generations are more practiced at horizontal reasoning, and because use stops neurons from dying are better at it.
[pause]
I am now going to start talking about the book, so a few disclaimers:
For the 85% of my friends that hate Foer (but not quite so much as they hate eggers) I am about to say some very nice things.
For the people out there that want to talk about poor gimmicks, this is not a good review for you.
For the people that think Foer didn’t go far enough with his gimmick because he wanted to get rich. He is already rich, get over it.
[/pause]
This book was created for those people who can split attention. The book is not meant to be read through the pages so much as experienced through the pages and read in order. It is important for the reader to have a relatively high memory span**** to enjoy this book.
What I mean here is that to enjoy this book it is very important to be able to focus on the words in the order that they go in and to keep them in mind until you are able to create a sensible line. This takes a bit of getting use to and some memory capacity. If you just open the book to a page and look at every word you see you aren’t going to get a story, you are just going to be confused. To get the story read in order. I know I keep saying this but I can’t stress this enough.
Reading without reading ahead is extremely difficult because you can see the next twenty pages, or parts of them through the book. On one hand this is totally awesome. On the other you kind of want to shove a piece of paper between the pages so you can read in peace. DON’T! Because here is the thing, if he wanted you to do that, he could have smushed all he words together and made it a short story. I hear you, “Not if he wanted to charge 40 dollars for it.” You know Foer wrote the words to book of photography, he could have done that here and charged more, but he didn’t. He says in multiple locations he wanted to make a die-cut for years. And the thing is if you can balance attention correctly it really comes across what makes this book truly special.
The pages are printed on one side only, when you turn a page, that moment, that thought you just lived through it’s gone. This is a really powerful idea. I mean yes you can say, he had to do that, the page cutting, the word forced it. That might be true but that doesn’t change the experience of reading it. When you think of those old children’s books where the illustrations had wax paper on both sides, or in the wrong place in the book, those were printing issues but it didn’t make them less special. I think this although I won’t ever know if it was just about printing isn’t so different.
But while the past is gone the future still lies ahead of you.
[pause]
Wait, I have to talk about plot for a second before I go on. This book to me isn’t unlike Legend of a suicide it’s a book about how people die, and when people die they don’t just die in one way and they don’t just die by themselves. They die for years before they actually die, and they start to kill those around them. But the book is also about hope about how even in the darkest places it is possible for the light to sneak in and trip us up to force us out of our depression. As steve martin says, “you can't play a sad song on the banjo.” This book is about how life cycles, how there are ups and downs but how ultimately we end up well, let’s just say we end up, you’ll have to read the book to have a better idea.
[/pause]
This book contains really intense moments of sadness and loss and in these moments the future looks different. There seems to be less words on the pages, there doesn’t seem to be many words down the road. I don’t know if this is a change in perception that comes along with the hopelessness, or if it is an actual design element of the book. But I think the fact that the book is able to invoke that feeling is important no matter which it actually is. The fact that the book is able to attach itself, embed itself, and make you notice these things is important. But if you can’t focus on more than the word you are reading you miss these waves. It is so important in reading this to direct attention in multiple directions.
In addition to noticing the numbers of words that occur on subsequent pages, I at least picked out specific words that occurred on subsequent pages while I read. I would be reading along and notice I was coming up on shame or father, or whatever else, and it feels a lot like life I think that nothing is ever as simple as what is simply occurring in the moment but so much occurs around it.
[pause]
You see this in the plot as well, when ideas and feeling tend to cycle
[/pause]
A lot of these sort of words tend to emphasize the theme of the story which seems to be a profound and fundamental loss. The emotions tend to bleed through from future pages giving them time to really percolate and develop before you get to the moment that they actually occur. This helps to make the story a lot stronger I think.
A last note that I think Foer says better than I could:
“I could not help but feel that Schulz’s hand must have been forced, that there must have existed some yet larger book from which the street of crocodiles was taken.
It is from this imagined larger book, this ultimate book, that every word ever written, spoken or hought is ever exhumed. The book of life is the temple that our lives strive to enter, but instead only conjure.”
Fiction is about trying to take the word we have and shape them into our human experience and that can’t always be done simply as black and white word on a page. Sometimes that gimmick that difference brings us one step closer to truth. And yeah as a rule I hate found text, but this is not so much found text as found life. I haven’t read the original, but I will, but I don’t think the fact that an original exists take away from what has been achieved here.
Reading this I couldn’t help but think of DFW (for obvious reasons) but not of what you think, I thought of This is Water. And coming out of this book as profoundly sad as I found it, I couldn’t help but think, “God the water’s nice over here.”
*Imagine how sad it would have been if I couldn’t get a copy I mean the damn book is on backorder now I would have cried.
**hilariously Mr. Fuller actually said “It has no gimmick” but when I corrected him he realized what he actually meant.
***Karen
****Okay memory span is a reference to a psychological test where you read sentences and you have to remember the last word of each sentence and repeat them back to the interview after reading like 5 sentences. People who read quickly tend to have high memory spans. Basically we are talking working memory levels. This is not the same as short term memory, it is shorter term and it is memory that is currently in use. The parts of the working memory that aren’t in use fade gradually unless they become re-primed before they fade out of memory. I could go on, but again relevance.
*************************************************
I read this book twice today once on the train and once at home.
Before:
OMG OMG OMG OMG
I've died and gone to gimmick heaven.
WANT WANT WANT WANT
August 24, 2012
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 Crocodiles it was the Father that was in a storm of delusions and psychosis. I also love where Foer ends this piece, on the note that he does and how he does it, when that original part of Street of Crocodiles is more in the middle (and has a completely different connotation). This piece has been given a much deeper meaning for me, and I'm giving it a 5. I love that through this work I discovered Bruno Schulz, an author that should be a much more well known as a classic and brilliant author than I think he currently is.
-----------------------
I would highly recommend reading this book in the order it was intended. First experience the prose and art without knowing Mr. Foer's process, then be sure to read the last few pages where he explains this book's origins. I feel I cannot properly review this book until I obtain the novella he mentions in the back, and to have read this book at least once more. But definitely read it first to experience the prose free of any opinions of the process - it seems random but is really quite beautiful. The images he captures are fleeting and absolutely worth it.
Once I understand more of the background and study this a bit more, I will probably add another star and give it my backing as one of my favorite reads.
-----------------------
I would highly recommend reading this book in the order it was intended. First experience the prose and art without knowing Mr. Foer's process, then be sure to read the last few pages where he explains this book's origins. I feel I cannot properly review this book until I obtain the novella he mentions in the back, and to have read this book at least once more. But definitely read it first to experience the prose free of any opinions of the process - it seems random but is really quite beautiful. The images he captures are fleeting and absolutely worth it.
Once I understand more of the background and study this a bit more, I will probably add another star and give it my backing as one of my favorite reads.
December 16, 2021
music: Radiohead - “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors”
4.5 stars.
Bruno Schalz – “The Street Of Crocodiles (JSF Die-Cut Remix)” ::)
If you’re a bit confused at first, reading the afterword – which does not spoil, really – will be helpful. I don’t think there’s much spoilers in the main text (built on the words left on each page; but you can also simultaneously read the page with the other pages’ words sometimes showing through). Only the right side of the cut pages have text, which made it a quickish read.
The rhythm that comes from the pages cut this way is fascinating – or, as one of my common phrases that use, says: “how interesting!” - beginning and the end feel calm, and so do some moments within, but sometimes there’s many-voices chaotic feel there too, thus my choice for the song that fits the book, above. You can feel the pages as mere sounds; the story you gather from the words left on the page is itself quite simple: hostile-feel city with masked people, city at night with stars, father’s mental falling apart.
In the afterword, Foer explains why his chose this book and this author for the die-cut experiment (done with permission); thoughts about writings lost, writings never written because persecution and death interrupted life. “The Street Of Crocodiles” is one of Foer’s favorite books, and he feels what he did with the book was like a gravestone rubbing, a dream of a book. He feels like “Street” was made of parts of a larger book (which I find also interesting).
This was a beautiful reading experience, my visual hunger was quite satisfied and purred a lot (haha). You do have to be a bit careful in turning pages, but the pages are not so thin as to make that hard. The story left in the pages was simple but clear, if you read just the words left on the page, lifting the page up a little to see it. So the reading of this story was a success in my case, and I can see myself enjoying it again when I will do a reread. Well worth it.
4.5 stars.
Bruno Schalz – “The Street Of Crocodiles (JSF Die-Cut Remix)” ::)
If you’re a bit confused at first, reading the afterword – which does not spoil, really – will be helpful. I don’t think there’s much spoilers in the main text (built on the words left on each page; but you can also simultaneously read the page with the other pages’ words sometimes showing through). Only the right side of the cut pages have text, which made it a quickish read.
The rhythm that comes from the pages cut this way is fascinating – or, as one of my common phrases that use, says: “how interesting!” - beginning and the end feel calm, and so do some moments within, but sometimes there’s many-voices chaotic feel there too, thus my choice for the song that fits the book, above. You can feel the pages as mere sounds; the story you gather from the words left on the page is itself quite simple: hostile-feel city with masked people, city at night with stars, father’s mental falling apart.
In the afterword, Foer explains why his chose this book and this author for the die-cut experiment (done with permission); thoughts about writings lost, writings never written because persecution and death interrupted life. “The Street Of Crocodiles” is one of Foer’s favorite books, and he feels what he did with the book was like a gravestone rubbing, a dream of a book. He feels like “Street” was made of parts of a larger book (which I find also interesting).
This was a beautiful reading experience, my visual hunger was quite satisfied and purred a lot (haha). You do have to be a bit careful in turning pages, but the pages are not so thin as to make that hard. The story left in the pages was simple but clear, if you read just the words left on the page, lifting the page up a little to see it. So the reading of this story was a success in my case, and I can see myself enjoying it again when I will do a reread. Well worth it.
February 8, 2011
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:
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.
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.
April 30, 2013
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.
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.
August 29, 2017
Ist "Tree Of Codes" noch ein Buch, oder sind wir hier bereits in einer anderen Form der Kunst gelandet? Denn Autor Jonathan Safran Foer hat sich hierfür nicht eine komplett eigene Geschichte ausgedacht, er hat dieses Buch aus der Erzählung "The Streets Of Crocodiles" von Bruno Schulz herausgeschnitten. Und genauso darf man diesen herausgefilterten Text auch lesen. Denn das Buch besteht vor allem aus Löchern in den Seiten, nur wenige Wörter sind noch im Gerippe vorhanden - ein wahres Fest für Bücherfreunde und Haptik-Fanatiker.
Sicherlich, man weiss nach dem Genuss nicht so genau, was Foer eigentlich damit bezwecken wollte. Ist dies nun eine Hommage? Ist dies überhaupt sein Werk oder weiterhin Schulzes Vermächtnis? Aber all diese Fragen sind nichtig vor der eigentlichen Schönheit dieses literarischen Produktes und der sprachlichen Wirkung. Denn der polnische Autor Schulz verstand es wie kein anderer, die Sprache zu einem Zaubermittel für Geschichten purer Schönheit zu verwandeln. Davon profitiert natürlich auch der Text Foers und schnell ist man als Leser in einem Zustand zwischen Traum und Fantasie.
"the sTREEts of croCODilEs" nimmt aber nicht nur das Geschriebene, sondern verändert auch die Zeit und den Spielraum des eigentlichen Buches, formt daraus etwas Aktuelles und macht, was schon bei Schulz immer so wunderschön war: Es dringt in eine neue Ebene vor, eine, die in der gelebten Welt so nicht vorkommt.
Sicherlich, man weiss nach dem Genuss nicht so genau, was Foer eigentlich damit bezwecken wollte. Ist dies nun eine Hommage? Ist dies überhaupt sein Werk oder weiterhin Schulzes Vermächtnis? Aber all diese Fragen sind nichtig vor der eigentlichen Schönheit dieses literarischen Produktes und der sprachlichen Wirkung. Denn der polnische Autor Schulz verstand es wie kein anderer, die Sprache zu einem Zaubermittel für Geschichten purer Schönheit zu verwandeln. Davon profitiert natürlich auch der Text Foers und schnell ist man als Leser in einem Zustand zwischen Traum und Fantasie.
"the sTREEts of croCODilEs" nimmt aber nicht nur das Geschriebene, sondern verändert auch die Zeit und den Spielraum des eigentlichen Buches, formt daraus etwas Aktuelles und macht, was schon bei Schulz immer so wunderschön war: Es dringt in eine neue Ebene vor, eine, die in der gelebten Welt so nicht vorkommt.
December 5, 2010
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.
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.
April 28, 2016
You could call this book pretentious and gimmicky. You wouldn't necessarily be wrong.
I really enjoyed it.
I need to re-read it a few times now.
I really enjoyed it.
I need to re-read it a few times now.
December 6, 2010
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?
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?
September 20, 2018
Reading Tree of Codes was refreshing, compelling, and an overall interesting experience. For those who are not aware, the majority of the text is cut out—literally—with a select few words scattered on each page. When you open the book, all of the words that are visible kind of just mix into each other, which makes the book almost impossible to read. I found the best method of reading this book was to either place a blank piece of paper behind the page you are currently reading, so only the words on the current page are visible, or to slightly lift up the page to isolate it from the rest of the book. The second method worked best for me, personally. This was a very quick read because there are only a few words on each page.
The story seemed almost vague to me as I read it, and combined with the format of the book, I felt drawn into the plot in a way I haven’t experienced before. It almost reminded me of how I felt while reading something like I'm Thinking of Ending Things, except more intrigue and less dread.
I have to admit, I actually read this a few weeks ago so I don’t remember exactly what happens within the book (plot-wise), but I haven’t forgotten how I felt while sifting through these pages. But I think sometimes the feeling a book leaves you with after you’re done reading it is a lot more meaningful than the actual story itself.
It’s very sweet, in a way, that Foer created this book from his favorite book, The Street of Crocodiles. True, he essentially mutilated the book, but in a way it’s like he’s honoring this other work of literature by using it to create his own work of literature (and honestly, a work of art).
The story seemed almost vague to me as I read it, and combined with the format of the book, I felt drawn into the plot in a way I haven’t experienced before. It almost reminded me of how I felt while reading something like I'm Thinking of Ending Things, except more intrigue and less dread.
I have to admit, I actually read this a few weeks ago so I don’t remember exactly what happens within the book (plot-wise), but I haven’t forgotten how I felt while sifting through these pages. But I think sometimes the feeling a book leaves you with after you’re done reading it is a lot more meaningful than the actual story itself.
It’s very sweet, in a way, that Foer created this book from his favorite book, The Street of Crocodiles. True, he essentially mutilated the book, but in a way it’s like he’s honoring this other work of literature by using it to create his own work of literature (and honestly, a work of art).
October 31, 2012
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 literature in an entire different way.
Watch my video review here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ek9bN...
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 literature in an entire different way.
Watch my video review here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ek9bN...
Read
February 19, 2023One of the books on my TBR for the longest, and my library got it for me through inter-library loan! Super interesting experience.
October 13, 2015
Next to the House of Leaves, there is a Tree of Codes, where was the Street of Crocodiles.
Tree of Codes est un die-cut book, mais surtout, Tree of Codes est purement et simplement un tour de force à l'instar de House of Leaves de Mark Z. Danielewski. À l’ère des iPad, des Kindle et autres objets de lecture numérique, Jonathan Safran Foer impose l’hégémonie du papier et on ne peut que féliciter la maison d’édition d’avoir suivi et publier ce merveilleux objet littéraire.
À l'image du titre "Tree of Codes" issu de "Street of Crocodiles", JSF a coupé dans le texte d'origine pour construire sa propre histoire et plonge son lecteur dans un monde surréaliste, poétique, onirique où temps et espace se brouillent, au milieu de l'ennui du monde, du vide de l'air et des masques peints. Le corps de l'histoire habite un autre corps, qui selon JSF habitait encore un autre. Les histoires naissent, comme exhumées d'une magie, celle, éternelle, des mots, et peut-être d'un secret à jamais perdu. JSF n'offre pas seulement une performance, mais profère un cri de passion pour un livre, pour les livres, pour la littérature.
Tree of Codes est une expérience de lecture comme il y en a peu, où tourner une page devient un acte lourd, précis, important. Même si ça ne dure que l’espace de 30 minutes.
Fragments:
“The passerby had their eyes half-closed. Everyone whole generations wore his mask. Children greeted each other with mask painted on their faces; they smiled at each other's smiles growing in this emptiness, wanting to, guiding our resemble the reflections, whole generations had fallen asleep.” (incipit)
“Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.”
“Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.”
Tree of Codes est un die-cut book, mais surtout, Tree of Codes est purement et simplement un tour de force à l'instar de House of Leaves de Mark Z. Danielewski. À l’ère des iPad, des Kindle et autres objets de lecture numérique, Jonathan Safran Foer impose l’hégémonie du papier et on ne peut que féliciter la maison d’édition d’avoir suivi et publier ce merveilleux objet littéraire.
À l'image du titre "Tree of Codes" issu de "Street of Crocodiles", JSF a coupé dans le texte d'origine pour construire sa propre histoire et plonge son lecteur dans un monde surréaliste, poétique, onirique où temps et espace se brouillent, au milieu de l'ennui du monde, du vide de l'air et des masques peints. Le corps de l'histoire habite un autre corps, qui selon JSF habitait encore un autre. Les histoires naissent, comme exhumées d'une magie, celle, éternelle, des mots, et peut-être d'un secret à jamais perdu. JSF n'offre pas seulement une performance, mais profère un cri de passion pour un livre, pour les livres, pour la littérature.
Tree of Codes est une expérience de lecture comme il y en a peu, où tourner une page devient un acte lourd, précis, important. Même si ça ne dure que l’espace de 30 minutes.
Fragments:
“The passerby had their eyes half-closed. Everyone whole generations wore his mask. Children greeted each other with mask painted on their faces; they smiled at each other's smiles growing in this emptiness, wanting to, guiding our resemble the reflections, whole generations had fallen asleep.” (incipit)
“Only now do I understand the war against boredom, the lost cause of empty hours, of empty days and nights.”
“Weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness.”
April 4, 2011
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:
"Only a few people noticed the lack of color, as in black-and-white photographs. This was real rather than metaphorical—a colorless sky, an enormous geometry of emptiness, a watery anonymous gray which did not throw shadows and did not stress anything, a screen placed to hide the true meanings of things, a facade behind which there was an overintense coloring."
Regardless of the content, the book itself is a delight to the senses. Closed, it looks like any other novel, but when you pick it up and look inside, you find that most of it has been carved away, revealing lone words, snippets of the original sentences, and dangling punctuation marks. It’s rather delicate, and I would be pretty hesitant to loan it out, but everyone should have a chance to experience this book that is just more than words on a page.
"Only a few people noticed the lack of color, as in black-and-white photographs. This was real rather than metaphorical—a colorless sky, an enormous geometry of emptiness, a watery anonymous gray which did not throw shadows and did not stress anything, a screen placed to hide the true meanings of things, a facade behind which there was an overintense coloring."
Regardless of the content, the book itself is a delight to the senses. Closed, it looks like any other novel, but when you pick it up and look inside, you find that most of it has been carved away, revealing lone words, snippets of the original sentences, and dangling punctuation marks. It’s rather delicate, and I would be pretty hesitant to loan it out, but everyone should have a chance to experience this book that is just more than words on a page.
December 24, 2021
•I am conflicted about how many stars I wanna give this book.
•When I first saw this book on bookstagram it looked so beautiful and very interesting and definitely the best piece of art I've ever seen.
•I consider this as a art of its own because the author has taken his favourite book and has memories the wordsz the phrases so much and has looked at it so much that he was able to delete some of it in it to create a whole new story.
•At the from author part it says that he was always wanting to do a piece like this, cuting out words or phrases from a book and creating a new story. And it is a brilliant, fascinating idea.
•For the art aspect, for my opinion, even 5 stars isn't enough because it is honestly so brilliant.
•But when it comes to the story itself.. 1 star would be a compliment. It is confusing and boring. I am not sure what the story is about. It was a bit hard to even focus on the words because they just didn't match to each other.
•It was quite interesting to read it in this way: holding the page you wanna read away from the others so you only read the ones you're meant to. But sometimes the spaces between the words would be too big to keep your mind on the last thing you read.
•Regardless, I am glad to have this book now. Because it is honestly really a piece of art. Although it is quiet boring and uninteresting.
•When I first saw this book on bookstagram it looked so beautiful and very interesting and definitely the best piece of art I've ever seen.
•I consider this as a art of its own because the author has taken his favourite book and has memories the wordsz the phrases so much and has looked at it so much that he was able to delete some of it in it to create a whole new story.
•At the from author part it says that he was always wanting to do a piece like this, cuting out words or phrases from a book and creating a new story. And it is a brilliant, fascinating idea.
•For the art aspect, for my opinion, even 5 stars isn't enough because it is honestly so brilliant.
•But when it comes to the story itself.. 1 star would be a compliment. It is confusing and boring. I am not sure what the story is about. It was a bit hard to even focus on the words because they just didn't match to each other.
•It was quite interesting to read it in this way: holding the page you wanna read away from the others so you only read the ones you're meant to. But sometimes the spaces between the words would be too big to keep your mind on the last thing you read.
•Regardless, I am glad to have this book now. Because it is honestly really a piece of art. Although it is quiet boring and uninteresting.
September 15, 2011
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 find is actually mirrored in reading any work of literature, when you think about trying to figure out the writer's style and purpose. Although I did not fully comprehend the story on my first quick reading, I found some of the passages to be so beautiful -- in that fashion that Foer's writing often is -- that I wanted to give the entire book five stars, right off. Singularly, they were masterful. Now I just have to work at putting it all together.
Although, writing this, I realize that Tree of Codes does lend itself to the expression of reading books in general -- a part of his purpose. All of my notes on his story that seem so unique, I realize, while exaggerated by the style, are truly a part of reading any writer's work. Masterful. I think I am leaning towards adding stars.
Although, writing this, I realize that Tree of Codes does lend itself to the expression of reading books in general -- a part of his purpose. All of my notes on his story that seem so unique, I realize, while exaggerated by the style, are truly a part of reading any writer's work. Masterful. I think I am leaning towards adding stars.
May 8, 2015
This is a masterpiece in so many ways. To take one's favorite book and make physical art out of it is such a beautiful thing. The language of the original Street of Crocodiles is the most poetic and beautiful thing ever, and this book Tree of Codes is the most beautiful book physically I have ever come across; to make art out of punctuation and random words is just mind-blowing.
February 3, 2018
precitane, hned dvakrat... A ja v podstate neviem o com ta kniha je, unikol mi pri tomto spracovani celok, bolo tam vsak niekolko myslienok, ktore ma chytili a prinutili na chvilu sa zamysliet... Necakany a neopakovatelny citatelsky zazitok!
December 9, 2019
I had wanted to read this book for the LONGEST time because of it's unique formatting. Instead of blackout poetry this is physically cut out storytelling. The story itself was alright but the real entertainment was just reading a book with a bunch of cut out hunks. Sorry, "cut out hunks" may be misleading as there are no actual images of totally ripped dudes in this book.
December 30, 2023
Das war artistically sehr gut aufbereitet.
Und endlich mal dark deepe Poetry
Und endlich mal dark deepe Poetry
January 11, 2023
I'm adding this to my "you can do it exactly once" list. Titles that do something that 'wow' the first time you read them, but the magic would be ruined if it were repeated.
August 3, 2011
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 it is very very cool. Foer takes his favorite childhood fable and literally cuts the book apart with a razor, lifting not words but whole paragraphs out of the original text in order to create a completely new story. A story, he says, that is about the last day of life.
Its like an epic poem, but because it is cut apart, sometimes with only ten words on a page filled with giant holes in the paper, it becomes a crazy reading experience as your eye searches for the next word and tries not to get confused by the vertigo inducing, MC Escher like backdrop.
The only thing I can think to say is that it seems like something that must be read multiple times and in multiple moods in order to savor the multiple emotional experiences that can resonate in the soul, like when one looks at their favorite painting.
(Yea, this is kind of a pretentious review. I know. sorry. "Talking about art is like dancin' about architecture" -- Ryan Phillipe in some crappy movie I saw a long time ago.)
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 it is very very cool. Foer takes his favorite childhood fable and literally cuts the book apart with a razor, lifting not words but whole paragraphs out of the original text in order to create a completely new story. A story, he says, that is about the last day of life.
Its like an epic poem, but because it is cut apart, sometimes with only ten words on a page filled with giant holes in the paper, it becomes a crazy reading experience as your eye searches for the next word and tries not to get confused by the vertigo inducing, MC Escher like backdrop.
The only thing I can think to say is that it seems like something that must be read multiple times and in multiple moods in order to savor the multiple emotional experiences that can resonate in the soul, like when one looks at their favorite painting.
(Yea, this is kind of a pretentious review. I know. sorry. "Talking about art is like dancin' about architecture" -- Ryan Phillipe in some crappy movie I saw a long time ago.)
July 26, 2016
This book is so extraordinary. The story itself is haunting, and the book is a really beautiful and precious object.
April 16, 2013
This book was so fun to read! And I really enjoyed the story as well. Definitely recommend this to everyone!
November 11, 2013
Each page of this book 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.
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:
"With secret spring, oneyco [that's part of the word "honeycombed," showing through from a later page] without transition, myself in an even
wider, more sumptuous interior
my father kept. and his desk a"
and so forth. (p. 82)
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.
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.[
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.
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:
"My father kept in his desk a
beautiful map of our city"
There are two missing lines of text, in Foer's book, between those two redacted lines of text. But the original (in English) is:
"My father kept in the lower drawer of his desk and old and beautiful map..."
(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).
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:
"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.
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:
" The tree of cod es was
better than a paper imitation
."
we read on p. 97; in the Penguin edition, p. 72, has
"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..."
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:
"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."
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:
"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)
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?
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.
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:
"With secret spring, oneyco [that's part of the word "honeycombed," showing through from a later page] without transition, myself in an even
wider, more sumptuous interior
my father kept. and his desk a"
and so forth. (p. 82)
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.
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.[
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.
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:
"My father kept in his desk a
beautiful map of our city"
There are two missing lines of text, in Foer's book, between those two redacted lines of text. But the original (in English) is:
"My father kept in the lower drawer of his desk and old and beautiful map..."
(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).
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:
"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.
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:
" The tree of cod es was
better than a paper imitation
."
we read on p. 97; in the Penguin edition, p. 72, has
"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..."
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:
"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."
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:
"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)
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?
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.
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