 |
| flickrhivemind.net |
When I sit down to read a book, it is generally
with the assumption that I know how to read that book. This is a fairly
arbitrary observation, a stupid one even, given that I wouldn’t have made it
halfway through college if I didn’t know how to read a book. But bear with me.
You will understand my confusion why when I first opened up Jonathan Safran
Foer’s Tree
of Codes I
wasn’t entirely sure how I was supposed to read it. The book is in English,
yes, but where sentences normally run from left to right uninterrupted there
were carefully cut holes revealing the layers of pages underneath. Was I
supposed to read straight across, the sentences made from the multiple layers
of cut pages? This proved incoherent. I flipped the pages in various
combinations trying to make sense of it. After spending far too much time doing
this, I realized that each page as meant to be read on its own, from word to
word, like a spider building a delicate web. When linked together, these
haphazard words built a story within a story as it were, and a brilliant piece
that only Safran Foer could create.
Let me explain. Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is
Illuminated and Extremely Loud
and Incredibly Close, always
wanted to try his hand at a die cut book. A die cut book has portions of the
pages cut out to make a new story with the remaining words. But he could never
find a book that felt right, that he felt had a story hiding within that story
waiting for him to cut out and set free. In time, he finally settled on one of his favorite books, Street of
Crocodiles by
Bruno Shulz. After a rather unorthodox writing process of cutting up
innumerable copies of Street of
Crocodiles, he created a completely unique work crafted from the Schulz’s
words.
I’d been waiting a long time to get my hands on
a copy of Tree
of Codes. All
my local bookstores proved unwilling to carry it and the price that comes with
such a unique book (plus shipping) dissuaded me from buying it online. So I
waited for a library to pick it up. Finally, within the last few weeks, I found
the newly released paperback edition at my hometown library and nearly broke
the cardinal rule of library-going to scream with excitement. After 2 years of
waiting (the book was released in 2010) and reading glowing reviews, my hopes
and expectations were rather high. Safran Foer –one of my favorite authors- did
not disappoint.
Though it came from a novel, I found Tree of Codes to be more of a long
prose poem than anything else stylistically. The narrator, never named or
identified, takes the reader through his city and his life on a final day,
perhaps his final day of life. He watches the torment of his mother and
father’s relationship, queries the purpose of his life and the lives of those
around him. Foer handles this beautifully- the holes in the pages mirror the
story with its rather ethereal feeling; the narrator constantly walks the line
between reality and fantasy and the narrative never feels lacking. What is perhaps
the most brilliant conception of the book is its namesake, the Tree of Codes. The
narrator observes a map of his city and the way in which the streets stretch
out like the branches of a tree and contains on those scrawling lines the
secrets and codes of all the people and places that fill in the empty spaces.
Essentially, the Tree of Codes contains life and perhaps, encrypted within, is the
meaning that the narrator seeks. The book itself is aptly named, for its
scrawling strips of story are not unlike a city map, and meaning is most
certainly waiting to be found within.
Tree of Codes really is a thing of
beauty, the first book of its kind. In a time when we constantly have to
redefine how we read and look at books, Safran Foer brings us back to literature
being a tangible piece of art. But in bringing us back, we are not taking a
step backwards into obscurity, but rather forwards to a revelation.
Written by Meaghan O'Brien
