He let his beautiful prose speak for itself. Secondly: The ingenious Bruno Schulz–a writer more gifted than Kafka, in my estimation–did not have to dazzle his readers with glistening typographies. Hamilton translated a French translation of the novel into English: His is the translation of a translation. Consider, for instance, Alastair Hamilton’s translation of Gombrowicz’s Pornografia. If you would like evidence for this assertion, take a look at any English translation of Jan Potocki, Bruno Schulz, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, or Witold Gombrowicz. What on Earth is the point of cutting up, mucking up, mashing up, and rescrambling the English translation of a Polish novel? Polish is frightfully difficult to render into English. Knock, knock! Schulz wrote in Polish, not in English. The first problem with Foer’s cut-up is that he chooses the wrong object. “Knot by knot he loosened himself, as unremarked as the grey heap swept into a corner waiting to be taken” (39). “The demands were made more loudly, we heard him talk to God, as if begging against insistent claims” (28).

Here are two of Foer’s vicious eviscerations: Anyone who finds this practice innovative should consult the work of Tristan Tzara, Brion Gysin, and Raymond Queneau. (Please note: The book is NOT called “The Street of Crocodiles,” no matter what Foer might tell you.) Foer then carved blocks of text out of the English translation, excising Schulz’s beautiful prose poetry, scissoring it up. To construct this monstrosity, Foer took an English translation of Bruno Schulz’s magisterial Sklepy Cynamonowe (“Cinnamon Shops,” 1934). There is more writing–more expressive language–in Max Ernst’s collage novels. It is the stifling of a book, a sequence of stillnesses.

It is an atomic weapon that is pitted against verbality, against writing, against the Word.

Tree of Codes (2010) is an anti-book, assaulting language, crushing words under the weight of optical imagery, a non-book in which words serve a merely ornamental function. What does one do if one wishes to become a writer but lacks verbal talent? If one is Jonathan Safran Foer, one mutes and mutilates magical masterpieces. “ 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.” WRITING WITH SCISSORS: A review of TREE OF CODES (Jonathan Safran Foer) IF YOU ARE AT LEAST TWENTY-EIGHT (28) YEARS OF AGE, CLICK THE IMAGE ABOVE TO READ MY NOVEL WATCH OUT: THE FINAL VERSION.

Foer tree of codes