Customer Reviews

Tree of Codes

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This book is just captivating. I can't even begin to describe the pleasure of unknowing and unexpected that I experienced when I opened it for the first time. I had to have it. The 40.00 price tag, while initially seemed steep, is totally justifiable when you actually put your fingers on the cover and open the paged and touch it. You've never felt or seen or experienced a book like this. I don't want to give too much away, but this book will change you and the way you look at printed material. You'll never get this kind of connection on a Kindle or iPad or Nook or any other device. This book just goes to show you why the physical page will never cease to exist. Thank you Mr. Foer.

Everybody I show this book to thinks it's crazy. It is first of all a completely beautiful object - I've never seen anything like it. Second, it's a beautifully written story that gave me the goose bumps. (Useful tip for other readers: I lay a sheet under the pages, when I was reading). Very much a return to the emotionally charged and experimental storytelling of Safran Foer's debut, Everything Is Illuminated.

I've loved everything Jonathan Safran Foer has written to date, but this just might be his most amazing work yet. What he has done by cutting his own haunting story out of Bruno Schulz' equally haunting Street of Crocodiles, is both astonishing and incredibly poignant. The book, with its ghostly die cuts and dangling phantom punctuation, is a different kind of reading experience, for sure, but as with his other books, I devoured it in one breathless sitting.

I remember the moment I realized the power of poetry. I was listening to a folk song--Dylan--so I should say "poetry". But no matter. Same principle. Anyway, I noticed that he had devised a particularly cool & clever rhyme and I asked myself, "How was he able to think so far outside the box?" when I realized he had been forced outside the box by having to come up with a rhyme for the previous line. His mind had been forced to abandon its familiar neural pathways, it had been given the boot, out into the cold and dark, forced to fend for itself. And in the case of Dylan, it was a rags-to-riches story, he became a self-made man. Most would-be poets do not fare so well, for their minds resist leaving the well-trodden pathways (cf. Timothy Leary & Carlos Castaneda). But for a rare few, poetry is a calling. Think of Shakespeare's sonnets, or Basho's haikus.
I just read a tree-book (and it can only ever be a tree-book--converting this into an e-book or audio-book would be blasphemy) that is ostensibly a novel, but one that has been written under a poetryesque constraint, for the writer, J.S. Foer (America's best living author--well, him & Eggers) took an existing work (by Bruno Schwarz) and deleted everything that was superfluous to the novel he was writing! Michelangelo was once asked how he was able to create his striking sculpture of David, to which he replied, "I just chipped away everything that did not look like David".
Rather than condensing the remains, Foer left the empty spaces, now die-cut so that the reader sees right through the page to the unfathomable depths below. Creation swimming against the tide of Nothingness. Yin set against endless echoes of Yang. So although its written in the well-known code known as "English", the layers of words create endlessly branching layers of meaning that one can never hope to fully decode (cf. Finnegans Wake). Indeed, reading it requires perpetually pulling oneself out of the depths back up to the surface.
I fear I've made it seem like a chore to read! It's not! It's a BLAST! Yes, it's Art, but it's also a lot of fun, exhilarating even. Dive in. Enjoy.

After ordering the book, I patiently awaited the experience that had attracted me in the first place, hearing about the book's uniqueness. My tastes lean toward the odd, the different or things that avoid the norm, so this seemed to be my cup of tea.

Once the book arrived, I immediately understood why the author stated that this book could not be made into a hardcover. The bound weight of hardcover binding would crush the delicate interior.

At first, upon opening it, I was shocked by all the un-gathered words that appeared in front of me. After some time,I realized that, I was conditioned to see the interior of a book written in a traditional format. I apparently was stuck in a rigid perspective without consciously knowing it. The perspective of the book did not need to change. I needed to change my perspective.

Communication is a funny thing. Some people and some writers (via writing),do a massive amount of talking. Talking only takes up 20 percent of human communications, with the body doing the other 80 percent.
This book is certainly more than it speaks. It is a way to realize that there are stories within stories,that things are deeper than we can see, with our very limited human perspective. But we can visualize it, if we read between the lines.

I loved JSF's "Everything is Clear..." as well as "Extremely Close..." and even "Eating Animals". I believe the man has talent overflowing the boundaries of normal humans . That said, I was quite excited to learn about "Tree of Codes" since the creative mind that put together these other books was a safe bet to continue his brilliance even further and I was looking forward to it with intense anticipation. Upon learning of JSF''s testimonial for "Street of Crocodiles," I bought it and read it since it was his admiration of the brilliance of that book that had inspired him to do "Code of Trees." It disappointed me for the simple fact I could not make any sense of it whatsoever. I wrote it off as perhaps a mediocre translation for the original Polish.

I ordered "T of C" from amazon even though it was a tad on the expensive side for a paperback...waited something like four months for delivery...even posted an inquiry to amazon since I was convinced they had misplaced the order...assured things were progressing as planned...it finally arrived and I dove into it with gusto.
I had read the postings of a number of his fans on the amazon site so I was fore-warned this book was more than a little out of the ordinary and might be challenging, to say the least. My reaction was, so much the better...it's JSF doing his thing and I will surely appreciate his efforts.
I began with the sheet or paper inserted behind the page being read (Suggested by previous reader) and took off running. For the uninformed, this is probably a required exercise for those of us who are unaccostumed to reading a page with perhaps 15 to 20 words on it (BTW, that would be a long page!) with large chucks of the page on which they have been printed literally cut out of the paper which means there is a gap or two (or six) not to mention difficult to handle.. My first attempt took me some twenty pages into the book before I sat back with the realization that I had absolutely no idea of the content of what I had just read. Add to that the fact I could not identify the characters involved although a second reading indicated there were two: the narrator and his/her mother, let alone the physical setting of the action...or better said, lack of. I put it aside with my previous warning that this was not going to be my ordinary reading experience. I read it a second time with much the same result. I began to worry that perhaps I was not capable of handling this book at all. I plowed on, hoping that a few pages more might open up the mysteries of this adventure. No such luck. I have read 87 pages to this point and I find myself in exactly the same spot. This is not fun. Have I gone stupid all of a sudden? A definite possibility or perhaps an admission that I had bitten off a lot more than I could chew.
Right now, I do not know what else to add. I have to decide if I should try again or simply accept the fact this one is beyond me. This is extremely uncomfortable since some reviewers claim the book is a masterpiece while it strikes me as an elaborate prank with me as the doofus mark being played like a banjo.
Ten months have passed between the above and what I am writing now. I just finished reading the remaining 47 pages with not an inkling more insight into the content of the story. I have come to the conclusion "Tree of Codes" has to be JSF's response to an imaginary challenge thrown out by NYT crossword master Will Shortz to create a puzzle to which the solution will result in utter confusion. He deserves the Grand Prize.

I had to abscond from Amazon and get this book at B & N where it was under $30 and in stock. This book is no mere book. It's a work of art, a poem, a treatise against banality. It's the most original book I now own. Sadly, you won't find it here, but you can get it at Barnes and Noble.

Worth every penny I paid for it and then some.

If you're having trouble reading this book, I would like to pass on an important tip from a previous reviewer (K.C. Andrews): Lay a sheet of blank paper under the page you are reading, then "everything will be illuminated".

This book is really poetry. I've only read it once so far, but I will be re-reading it soon. The whole thing is just magical. To call it a novel or a story isn't really that close to the mark. I think, and I'm paraphrasing Foer a little bit, but this is basically the ghost of a story. It existed inside of Street of Crocodiles, and the words are not Foer's, but the story and the joining and connection of Schulz's blips and phrases does belong to Foer. It's an amazing achievement, and art in its own right. I couldn't recommend this highly enough. The whole can't really be summarized in so short of a review, so I'll finish with one quote, "We shall have this as our aim: a gesture."

Don't overpay. This book at it's MSRP is $40, and worth slightly less and certainly not in the $100-$300 range. I found it at my local bookstore for the normal retail price. Its contents are a one sided printing of The Street of Crocodiles (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) cut out to form an 'interesting' interpretation/new narrative.

The only way this book could be printed is in paperback, there is no hardcover.
When looking at a single page the cutout method allows the reader to see several pages down, presumably allowing one to see multiple versions of sentence structures. The printing process is not as revolutionary as the publisher would like you to believe; the pages rarely align well enough to allow for line to line reading of multiple pages, words are often obscured by pages on top. Making it nearly unreadable.

As to what can be deciphered; imagine someone took a knife to one of your favorite novellas (the source material tops out at about 150pgs).