The pages are also fragile, and I found myself holding Tree of Codes with extra care.
Tree of Codes is intent on distracting its audience and making them conscious of the reading experience. There’s something haunting about seeing what lays ahead, just out of focus. Some readers have taken to inserting a blank sheet of paper behind each page, but doing that feels like a denial of the book’s design. After a few minutes, I figured out that the best method was to keep a finger under the page I was reading, bending it slightly, to give the words more depth (again, I mean physical depth). Because of Tree’s die-cut pages, it’s hard to tell what words belong on the page you’re looking at and what’s on the next page or two.
I don’t mean interpreting the text - the prose, though occasionally aloof, reads as a fairly straightforward narrative - but how to physically hold the book. The first thing you have to do with Tree of Codes is figure out how to read it. What Foer has done is a little gimmicky and not entirely new - William Burroughs and Brion Gyson did a similar cut-up book in the ‘60s - but the reading experience is an absorbing challenge. It’s a wonderful experiment in what a book can be, and also home to a mediocre novel. Visually, the sparse prose and overwhelming negative space leaves a stunning impression, (accurately captured in what might be the least-annoying book trailer of all time). (Cut ten letters from the original title and you get Tree of Codes.) If Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is the book equivalent of a mash up, perhaps Tree of Codes is akin to 8-bit music: it’s both a reduction and reinterpretation of another work. The die-cut interior of Tree of Codes is made up of select words, carefully re-assembled from Foer’s favorite novel, Bruno Schultz’s The Street of Crocodiles, to create an entirely new narrative. The Kindle does away with all manners of a novel’s physical form and design Tree of Codes exists solely to embrace those things, and to be embraced, but gently. It seems fitting that Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book Tree of Codes was published around the same Christmas season when the Kindle became Amazon’s best-selling product ever.
They demand attention solely to the text, the kind of undistracted reading environment that makes e-readers so appealing - not to mention the perk of carrying a small electronic device instead of a 700-page hardcover copy of Freedom. In an interview with The AV Club, he said the Kindle “makes everything seem unsubstantial,” that “the words seem more arbitrary, less intrinsically valuable.” Yet Franzen writes the kinds of novels that are best read on the Kindle.
Jonathan Franzen has always been outspoken about his disdain of e-readers.
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