The ballet is a collaboration between choreographer Wayne McGregor, installation artist Olafur Eliasson and electronic producer/musician Jamie xx, inspired by American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer’s work of the same name. Although I wouldn't want all my reading to be like this, it was a really fascinating reading experience.In October this year, Melbourne hosted the Australian premiere of the internationally acclaimed contemporary ballet Tree of Codes. It makes meaning and resists meaning at the same time. It seems to me that Tree of Codes is its own thing: a sort of hybrid form, half a book and half a work of some other kind of art. It is a small response to that great book.' This is in no way a book like The Street of Crocodiles. Because I haven't read The Street of Crocodiles, I can't comment on the relationship between the two books, but this is what Foer has to say: '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. The windows in the pages are the places where text was removed from the original to make the new book. The whole thing is dreamlike and strange and it was hard to hold any element of it in my mind for long, so I just let it wash over me.Įventually I learned that the text of the book all comes from The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz (a book I haven't read), and that Foer created Tree of Codes by strategically removing words, phrases, and whole sentences from The Street of Crocodiles. The book contains a great deal of abstraction, punctuated occasionally by strong, visceral images. There is not much of anything that could be a called a plot, but there is a family in which the mother and father exist in mysterious opposition to each other, and a city in which strange weather events are carefully observed. Gradually I realized that the words on each individual page made sentences when read together, so then I read the book that way, page by page, and a narrative began to emerge.

The effect was incantatory, entrancing-a slow evolution happening in prose.

Some phrases could be seen for several pages so I read them over several times, each time slightly different than the one before as the overlapping words changed or disappeared. I started reading it the second way, and found it fascinating. It's possible to read the book in two different ways: you can read only the words that are printed on each individual page, or you can read through the pages, reading everything that you can see every time you turn the page. Each page is die cut around certain words and phrases, leaving little wisps of meaning on the page and large windows through which other layers of text can be seen. This is a page from Tree of Codes, by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Jonathan tree safran of foer