To create the book, Foer took Bruno Schulz’s novel ‘The Street of Crocodiles’ and cut out the majority of the words. His publisher calls it a “sculptural object”. “Tree of Codes” is in no way a book like “The Street of Crocodiles.” It is a small response to that great book.The Times described Jonathan Safran Foer’s (born 1977) ‘Tree of Codes’ as a “true work of art”. I’ve never memorized so many phrases or, as the act of carving progressed, forgotten so many phrases. I’ve never read anotherīook so intensely or so many times. My first severalĭrafts read more like concrete poetry, and I hated them.Īt times I felt that I was making a gravestone rubbing of “The Street of Crocodiles,” and at times that I was transcribing a dream that the book might have had. The story of “Tree of Codes” is continuousĪcross pages, but I approached the project one page at a time: looking for promising words or phrases (they’re all promising), trying to involve and connect what had become my characters.
Good, so much better than anything that could conceivably be done with it, that my first instinct was always to leave it alone.įor about a year I also had a printed manuscript of “The Street of Crocodiles” with me, along with a highlighter and a red pen. On top of which, so many of Schulz’s sentences feel elemental, unbreakdownable.
This same process of carving, but every choice I made was dependent on a choice Schulz had made. Of course 100 people would have come up with 100 different books using Unlike novel writing, which is the quintessence of freedom, here I had my hands tightly bound. Working on this book was extraordinarily difficult. On the brink of the end of paper, I was attracted to the idea of a book that can’t forget it It was hardly an original idea: it’s a technique that has, in different ways,īeen practiced for as long as there has been writing - perhaps most brilliantly by Tom Phillips in his magnum opus, “A Humument.” But I was more interested in subtracting than adding, and also in creating a book with a three-dimensional life. I took my favorite book, Bruno Schulz’s “Street of Crocodiles,” and by removing words carved out a new story.
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