This objet d'art, composed substantially of empty spaces, is a conceptual must-have. What postgraduate who salivates at the sight of words such as 'metatextuality', 'intertextuality' and 'hypertextuality' could fail to feel a swelling in the PhD gland? Form and content are in intimate dialogue here.

Tree of Codes is a godsend to academics everywhere. Foer doesn't need another bestseller, but he could do with a boost to his wobbly critical standing. Nevertheless, it may prove to be a shrewd career move.

Does such amiably arrogant, faux-naïve spin sound familiar? Foer's detractors will seize upon this project as yet another example of his characteristic blend of whimsy and hubris – the same artifice-dazzled unawareness of being out of one's depth that birthed his 9/11 fable Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Despite the fact that all the words in Tree of Codes – including many complete phrases and sentences – are Schulz's, Foer insists 'This book is mine.' Indeed, he argues that in a sense, every book ever written is chopped out of another one, ie the dictionary. A boutique publisher called Visual Editions, working in tandem with die-cut specialists in the Netherlands and a 'hand-finisher' in Belgium, has produced a £25 artefact that, if you share Foer's aesthetics, has 'a sculptural quality' that's 'just beautiful', or which, if you're an average reader, might make you think a wad of defenceless print has been fed through an office shredding machine.įoer has wanted to 'create a die-cut book by erasure' for years, and considered using encyclopaedias or his own novels as raw material before settling on The Street of Crocodiles. Snip seven letters from the title Street of Crocodiles and you get Tree of Codes – and so on, for 134 intricately scissored pages. What Foer has done is cut Schulz's text to ribbons and turn it into a different book credited to Jonathan Safran Foer. So, might Foer do something to bring Schulz's book back into print in the UK? Or might he commission a fresh translation? (Celina Wieniewska's 1963 version still reads like a dream to me, but there have been mutterings about its faithfulness for decades.) Might he script or bankroll a movie adaptation? In this case, I felt the compulsion to do something with it.' How might this active love manifest itself? A foreword to a new edition of Schulz's masterwork? No, Foer had already done that, for the Penguin Classics reissue published in 2008 in the US (but sadly not here). 'Some things you love passively,' Foer told Vanity Fair, 'some you love actively. J onathan Safran Foer's all-time favourite book is Bruno Schulz's Cinnamon Shops, retitled The Street Of Crocodiles when it was translated into English 47 years ago.

Safran of foer codes