Book cover: Tree of Codes

Tree of Codes, by Jonathan Safran Foer, Visual Editions 2010, cover by gray318, interior design by Visual Editions/Sara De Bondt

Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book Tree of Codes looks like an ordinary paperback. Its exterior, by Jonathan Gray, who has designed all of Safran Foer’s covers, vaguely reminiscent of his debut, Everything Is Illuminated. Open it up, however, and you’ll get a shock. Tree of Codes is a book of gaps, each page showing massive holes where the text should be, with only the occasional word or phrase spared for us to read.

What Foer has done is take his favourite book – Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles – and radically censor it, cutting most of the words to leave, or discover, a new story that was buried within it. Foer’s narrative does take some decoding: words from later pages peek through the holes in the page you’re reading, inserting themselves in the wrong sentence. The story – about a man’s “enormous last day of life” – is a trail that the reader must find and lose and find again as they master this new immersive way of reading.

Clearly this is as much a piece of conceptual art as it is a book – you might think of William Burroughs with his cut-ups, or George Perec’s La Disparition with its missing letter “e”, or Tom Phillips’ A Humument (just released as an iPad app), in which the artist painted over unwanted text, rather than snipping it out. But Foer’s act of erasure is a response, above all, to the story of Schulz himself, who was shot as a Jew during the second world war, and the vast bulk of whose work is now lost.

The book is quite a coup for new London-based publishing house Visual Editions, but publishers Anna Gerber and Britt Iversen want it to be read, not just marvelled over: “We don’t want to make coffee-table books,” they say. “We want to make something that has a soul as a book, and that has to come from the narrative. There is a poetry that comes from the rhythm you get from the holes in the pages.”