Safran Foer takes a scissor to his favorite book
I am very excited to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book Tree of Codes. To create it, Safran Foer cut out sections of his favorite book, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. By subtracting text he was able to create a new story. The thing is part arts/crafts project, part narrative puzzle, part hommage to changing technology. Otherwise said, it has my name written all over it. Book publicist, where the hell is my free copy!
Codes is a work that really is specific to the medium. A common line in articles about this book is, roughly said: Isn’t this interesting that here is finally a book that really could not be done on an iPad or Kindle.
However, I could imagine a nice version of this done for the iPad. It’d need to be done as if each page were a photograph; it’d need to give the look of flipping pages.
I can deny that the physical page means more here than it does in many books. I mean, plenty of kinds of books work well on tape (not really tape, but audio whatever whatever). This one wouldn’t.
In a Vanity Fair interview with Heather Wagner, he says:
“Some things you love passively, some you love actively. In this case, I felt the compulsion to do something with it. Then I started thinking about what books look like, what they will look like, how the form of the book is changing very quickly. If we don’t give it a lot of thought, it won’t be for the better. There is an alternative to e-books. And I just love the physicality of books. I love breaking the spine, smelling the pages, taking it into the bath… I thought: What if you pushed it to the extreme, and created something not old-fashioned or nostalgic but just beautiful? It helps you remember that life can surprise you.”
