Visual Editions, January 2010
Jonathan Safran Foer's latest effort, Tree of Codes, is simultaneously a paean to his favorite book, Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and a bold artistic experiment with the form of the physical book. What it delivers from a literary perspective is less obvious.
Foer, having wanted to work with die-cutting, "a perfect intersection of visual arts and literature," for some time, took Street of Crocodiles through a sculpting process in which he radically cut from the original text to unearth a new story that lay beneath. The result, which on the outside looks like an ordinary bound paperback, is radically different from anything else you may have experienced, unless you're acquainted with William Burrough's cut-ups or Tom Phillips' A Humument. Each page of Tree of Codes is custom die-cut so that the bulk of Schulz's writing is removed, leaving only the words chosen by Foer to make up a much shorter work, perhaps 30 to 45 minutes of reading, tops.
As an objet d'art, Tree of Codes is fascinating and beautiful, each page composed of numerous windows into words, blank space and further windows beneath. I was surprised to find the book bound as a paperback because, more than anything, this book is a thing of beauty that will be collected and treasured. As such, Tree of Codes is receiving rave reviews from the art and design community, but as to its literary merits, the jury's still out.
Jonathan Safran Foer's latest effort, Tree of Codes, is simultaneously a paean to his favorite book, Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and a bold artistic experiment with the form of the physical book. What it delivers from a literary perspective is less obvious.
Foer, having wanted to work with die-cutting, "a perfect intersection of visual arts and literature," for some time, took Street of Crocodiles through a sculpting process in which he radically cut from the original text to unearth a new story that lay beneath. The result, which on the outside looks like an ordinary bound paperback, is radically different from anything else you may have experienced, unless you're acquainted with William Burrough's cut-ups or Tom Phillips' A Humument. Each page of Tree of Codes is custom die-cut so that the bulk of Schulz's writing is removed, leaving only the words chosen by Foer to make up a much shorter work, perhaps 30 to 45 minutes of reading, tops.
As an objet d'art, Tree of Codes is fascinating and beautiful, each page composed of numerous windows into words, blank space and further windows beneath. I was surprised to find the book bound as a paperback because, more than anything, this book is a thing of beauty that will be collected and treasured. As such, Tree of Codes is receiving rave reviews from the art and design community, but as to its literary merits, the jury's still out.
© Visual Editions
Foer's story - or should I say that which Foer left of Schulz's story - is an enigmatic collection of loosely-connected images that form something more akin to a prose poem than an actual story. "The gale seemed to explode dead colors onto the unkempt sky" and "Amid the fragments of an extinct landscape I yawned toward the sun" are representative sentences that while individually striking, when taken as a whole in this work fall short of anything like a cohesive tale.
Schulz's Street of Crocodiles is a Kafkaesque collection of short stories that centers upon a family running a textile shop in the marketplace of a small town. The stories in this collection, published originally in Polish in 1934, are narrated by the young son, but they focus particularly on the family's father, who throughout the book descends dreamlike into madness. Foer's work, the title of which is similarly cut from Street of Crocodiles, also focuses on Father and his descent into nonexistence in its own disconnected way.
Schulz's Street of Crocodiles is a Kafkaesque collection of short stories that centers upon a family running a textile shop in the marketplace of a small town. The stories in this collection, published originally in Polish in 1934, are narrated by the young son, but they focus particularly on the family's father, who throughout the book descends dreamlike into madness. Foer's work, the title of which is similarly cut from Street of Crocodiles, also focuses on Father and his descent into nonexistence in its own disconnected way.
Ultimately, Tree of Codes straddles art and literature in a way that is no surprise given the author's previous ventures in this arena. Foer began his literary career in 2001 as the editor of the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, and he continued to blur the lines between form and meaning in his 2005 novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
While I could never recommend to a friend that he or she shell out the $40 to buy this latest work of art-literature, I'm sure I will frequently pull Tree of Codes from the shelf to see the look of amazement as visitors flip through its intricately-wrought pages.
While I could never recommend to a friend that he or she shell out the $40 to buy this latest work of art-literature, I'm sure I will frequently pull Tree of Codes from the shelf to see the look of amazement as visitors flip through its intricately-wrought pages.
Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.
