Description
"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."--Publisher description.… (more)
Genres
Collection
Publication
Visual Editions (2010), Edition: 1st Edition, 285 pages
Pages
285
Media reviews
It’s just too bad that in the case of Tree of Codes, the reading experience is far more interesting than the actual novel. Holding the book, you can feel an absence of weight in the middle. Even within 3,000 words, Tree of Codes inconsistently waivers from abstract poignance (“The tree stood
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with the arms upraised and screamed and screamed.”) to the sort of pretentious mediocrity you might find in DeviantArt poetry (“I could feel waves of laid bare, of dreams.”). It boils down to whether or not you find Foer’s lyricism to be poetic or merely sentimental. Show Less
Het is een mooie gedachte. Maar in de praktijk is zijn extract een weinig overtuigend allegaartje geworden. Als het gewoon gedrukt was, op gewoon papier, zou het niet veel lezers hebben getrokken. Nu wel, maar alleen door de spectaculaire vormgeving.
User reviews
LibraryThing member JimElkins
This is a tricky book to review. Each page is perforated, die-cut, so you see through parts of it, and read phrases, words, parts of words, and punctuation marks deep into the book. So there's the physical book itself, the thing, which needs to be understood. Then -- a separate issue, and the
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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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.
Show Less
LibraryThing member jasonlf
This may be at the pinnacle of its genre and an impressive work of art that repays reading and rereading. But despite being a unique and memorable experience, it wasn't for me.
Tree of Codes is essentially a short story formed by Jonathan Safran Foer taking Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles
The other big plus of this book is that it motivated me to read The Street of Crocodiles.
Tree of Codes is essentially a short story formed by Jonathan Safran Foer taking Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles
Show More
and cutting out most of the words on every line. What is left is a story with a completely different title (___ _tree of C_o_d__es) and a completely different story. I only dimly comprehended the story, which seemed to be about a city, a father, and various other things -- although I'm sure that the dim comprehension was some sort of failure on my part. If it were printed like a normal story I would not have finished it, but the experience of turning the puzzle-like pages, each one cut in a different manner leaving holes and spaces and truncated words, was fascinating and worth doing once a lifetime.The other big plus of this book is that it motivated me to read The Street of Crocodiles.
Show Less
LibraryThing member wwtct
This book is a serious piece of art. I guess it could be gimmicky to some, but I think it's beautiful. The story itself took me like 45 minutes to read, which was mostly being scared to turn pages too fast, but I did find it compelling. I haven't read The Street of Crocodiles yet, but I definitely
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want to. Show Less
LibraryThing member bibliovermis
When you get past the gimmicky cut-out pages, this book is basically a book of poetry. I find the concept of producing a work from the words in another work interesting, and I'm certain the poetry produced is fine. However, the execution of the book, with its die cut pages, makes the actual process
Many people found this process to be a fascinating part of the book experience. I just found it really, really annoying. For me, it made it even harder to keep track of what was going on.
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of reading the book nigh impossible. Each page had to be lifted away from those behind it and inspected for content.Many people found this process to be a fascinating part of the book experience. I just found it really, really annoying. For me, it made it even harder to keep track of what was going on.
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LibraryThing member lizmcglynn
I admit that I probably rushed through this too much; there's just something about the way that it is made up that just kept pushing me further. A few pages caught my eye, but they were as individuals rather than the whole. I'm not quite sure there is a coherent whole, but I will make sure to read
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it more carefully the second time. It's just difficult to string the pages together when they're halfway see-through and you have to move the piece of paper you put under each page in order to see what you're reading every time you flip to a new page. It's a very, very cool idea and I commend JSF for his inventiveness and his ability to create a whole new meaning out of someone else's work to make it his own. There were some veritably beautiful moments. I'll just have to read it again to see if the work as a whole is beautiful. I have hope. Show Less
LibraryThing member earthforms
This book is a serious piece of art. I guess it could be gimmicky to some, but I think it's beautiful. The story itself took me like 45 minutes to read, which was mostly being scared to turn pages too fast, but I did find it compelling. I haven't read The Street of Crocodiles yet, but I definitely
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want to. Show Less
LibraryThing member nosajeel
This may be at the pinnacle of its genre and an impressive work of art that repays reading and rereading. But despite being a unique and memorable experience, it wasn't for me.
Tree of Codes is essentially a short story formed by Jonathan Safran Foer taking Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles
The other big plus of this book is that it motivated me to read The Street of Crocodiles.
Tree of Codes is essentially a short story formed by Jonathan Safran Foer taking Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles
Show More
and cutting out most of the words on every line. What is left is a story with a completely different title (___ _tree of C_o_d__es) and a completely different story. I only dimly comprehended the story, which seemed to be about a city, a father, and various other things -- although I'm sure that the dim comprehension was some sort of failure on my part. If it were printed like a normal story I would not have finished it, but the experience of turning the puzzle-like pages, each one cut in a different manner leaving holes and spaces and truncated words, was fascinating and worth doing once a lifetime.The other big plus of this book is that it motivated me to read The Street of Crocodiles.
Show Less
LibraryThing member detailmuse
Already for some time our town had been sinking at the edges,
lowering under the fantastic domes of night.
We lived in one of those dark houses, so difficult to distinguish one from the other.
This gave endless possibilities for mistakes.
the wrong staircase, unfamiliar balconies, unexpected {…}
Yes,
Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles is Jonathan Safran Foer’s favorite book, and he likens its existence (amid the destruction of most of Schulz’s work) to the fourth wall at the ancient temple site that resisted destruction and became the Wailing Wall. Foer had long wanted to “sculpt” a new book by redacting words from an existing “block” of text, and Tree of Codes is that, and an homage to Schulz.
I went through phases as I read: he’s stealing Schulz’s story; then: no, he’s just using words that are freely available, including in Schulz’s work. In the end, it did seem to be Foer’s own work, yet with a feeling of the larger original, particularly that so much is a father, mother, family in decline. Most pages are a mere sentence or two, written with the brevity and imagery of poetry. Schulz’s work is surreal fantasy and Foer’s even more so.
lowering under the fantastic domes of night.
We lived in one of those dark houses, so difficult to distinguish one from the other.
This gave endless possibilities for mistakes.
the wrong staircase, unfamiliar balconies, unexpected {…}
Yes,
Show More
this is a gimmick (though a meaningful gimmick) and yes, it works.Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles is Jonathan Safran Foer’s favorite book, and he likens its existence (amid the destruction of most of Schulz’s work) to the fourth wall at the ancient temple site that resisted destruction and became the Wailing Wall. Foer had long wanted to “sculpt” a new book by redacting words from an existing “block” of text, and Tree of Codes is that, and an homage to Schulz.
I went through phases as I read: he’s stealing Schulz’s story; then: no, he’s just using words that are freely available, including in Schulz’s work. In the end, it did seem to be Foer’s own work, yet with a feeling of the larger original, particularly that so much is a father, mother, family in decline. Most pages are a mere sentence or two, written with the brevity and imagery of poetry. Schulz’s work is surreal fantasy and Foer’s even more so.
Show Less
LibraryThing member bookworm12
This is the strangest concept for a book that I’ve ever read. I’ve always enjoyed Jonathan Safran Foer’s work, so when this one came out I was immediately intrigued. I bought a copy in 2011 and it’s been on my shelf ever since. It’s not one of those books you can easily pick up and read.
The entire book is created out of the text of another book, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles. Foer chose his favorite book and then painstakingly chose a few words from each page to craft a new work. Every single page is die-cut, which makes it difficult to read. I finally found that the easiest way for me to read it was to place a dark sheet of paper after each page that I read. It was time-consuming, but that slowed me down enough to reflect on the words.
It’s absolutely a gimmick that could be a crutch, but somehow the novel is beautiful and haunting in its own right. Here’s one section…
"In the depths of the grayness, weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness."
The plot revolves around a boy watching his father’s decent into madness or depression. The lyrical lines convey the anguish, but the plot is secondary.
My only regret is that I didn’t read The Street of Crocodiles first. That’s the main reason I waited so long to read Foer’s book, but I just haven’t found a copy yet. I need to just order one online, because I’d love to compare the works.
BOTTOM LINE: A fascinating work of art. The plot matters very little, but Foer’s skill as a writer comes through even when he is whittling away instead of building from scratch. It was an experience to read it. Not one I’d repeat, but definitely worth doing once.
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The entire book is created out of the text of another book, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles. Foer chose his favorite book and then painstakingly chose a few words from each page to craft a new work. Every single page is die-cut, which makes it difficult to read. I finally found that the easiest way for me to read it was to place a dark sheet of paper after each page that I read. It was time-consuming, but that slowed me down enough to reflect on the words.
It’s absolutely a gimmick that could be a crutch, but somehow the novel is beautiful and haunting in its own right. Here’s one section…
"In the depths of the grayness, weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn, we were full of aimless endless darkness."
The plot revolves around a boy watching his father’s decent into madness or depression. The lyrical lines convey the anguish, but the plot is secondary.
My only regret is that I didn’t read The Street of Crocodiles first. That’s the main reason I waited so long to read Foer’s book, but I just haven’t found a copy yet. I need to just order one online, because I’d love to compare the works.
BOTTOM LINE: A fascinating work of art. The plot matters very little, but Foer’s skill as a writer comes through even when he is whittling away instead of building from scratch. It was an experience to read it. Not one I’d repeat, but definitely worth doing once.
Show Less
LibraryThing member petervanbeveren
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
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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. Show Less
Original language
English
Original publication date
2010