Tree of Codes

I am a book dork ... most of you know that. And I know several readers of this blog share that affinity. Thus, I have to share the book that I am currently most excited about.
I have been a fan of Jonathan Safran Foer ever since reading "Eating Animals". Now, all you vegetarian-haters, don't go gettin your panties in a twist and write him off. That book is fabulous, even if you have absolutely no interest in a meatless lifestyle. It is not the dry, morality-wielding literature that characterizes most vegetarian writing. It is funny, creative, philosophical, anecdotal, well-rounded and engaging. I have yet to read his other two books, "Everything is Illuminated" and "Extremely Load and Incredibly Close," but I saw that Barnes and Noble is carrying a pretty hardcover edition with both titles in it (good Xmas present ... I'm just sayin').
But he recently released his newest work, "Tree of Codes." I am thrilled at the prospect of reading it, because it is not an entirely original piece of work, but a story fashioned out of words from "Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno Schulz. I was reading about it online, and came across Foer's own description of the task --

Working on this book was extraordinarily difficult. Unlike novel writing, which is the quintessence of freedom, here I had my hands tightly bound. Of course one hundred people would have come up with one hundred different books using this same process of erasing words from "Street of Crocodiles" in order to carve out a new story, but every choice I made was dependent on a choice Bruno Schulz had made. On top of which , so many of Schulz's sentences feel elemental, unbreakdownable. And his writing is so unbelievably good, so much better than anything that could conceivably be done with it, that more often than not I simply wanted to leave it alone.

For about a year I always had a printed manuscript of "Street of Crocodiles" with me, along with a highlighter and red pen. The story of "Tree of Codes" is continuous across pages, but I approached the project one page at a time: looking for promising words or phrases, trying to involve and connect what had become my characters, and thinking, too, about how the page would look. My first several drafts read more like concrete poetry, and I hated them.

At times I felt that I was making a gravestone rubbing of "The Street of Crocodiles," and at times that I was transcribing a dream that "The Street of Crocodiles" might have had. I have never read another book so intensely or so many times. I've never memorized so many phrases, or, as the act of erasure progressed, forgotten so many phrases. Tree of Codes is a small response to a great book. It is a story in its own right, but it is not exactly a work of fiction, or even a book.

I am astounded by the creativity of this task, but the relentless commitment to his artistic vision is what really arrested me. I am sure someone else has thought of creating a story in this way, but surely shrugged it off as too daunting and impractical a task. But Foer was not easily discouraged, and invested the whole of his mental and artistic energies into something wildly new and wonderful.

I haven't even read it, but I am pretty sure the entire world should read it -- the cutouts in the pages seem an inspriation to look at the world differently, to scheme drastic and undoable dreams, and then offer the world your gifts by doing those very dreams.