Thankfully, we found Die Keure in Belgium who relished the challenge of making a book with a different die-cut on every page. Having considered working with various texts, Jonathan decided to cut into and out of what he calls his "favourite book": The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.Īs Jonathan began to carve out his story, we started doing our production homework and literally got turned down by every printer we approached - their stock line being "the book you want to make just cannot be made". This led to Jonathan deciding to use an existing piece of text and cut a new story out of it. With that as our mutual starting point, we spent many months of emails and phone calls, exploring the idea of the pages’ physical relationship to one another and how this could somehow be developed to work with a meaningful narrative. Our early conversations with Jonathan Safran Foer about Tree of Codes started when Jonathan said he was curious to explore and experiment with the die-cut technique.
Luckily, I enjoyed it it was time well spent. This is a book I feel I need to read several times - and slowly - to tease out its meaning. The fact that he was able to create a coherent story at all out of existing text seems astonishing to me. Foer states, "Working on this book was extraordinarily difficult," and I don't doubt that statement at all. At the end of this book, I felt like I had experienced something completely unknown to the world of literature. Like Chris Ware's Building Stories, the format here affects and informs your feelings about what you are reading. I wouldn't actually classify this as a novel (or even a short story), but it is something - something new. The die-cut style tends to force the reader to go slowly and haltingly, which makes the story almost poetic. The narrator of Foer's version uses a stream-of-consciousness technique to share his thoughts about his parents. The text he ultimately leaves makes up this very short story.
Foer uses the text of another book - Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles - as a starting point, but instead of embellishing or continuing Schulz's story, Foer removes text. Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes is an odd book - very odd.
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