Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer review

Jonathan 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. "Some things you love passively," Foer told Vanity Fair, "some you love actively. 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). 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?

No. What Foer has done is cut Schulz's text to ribbons and turn it into a different book credited to Jonathan Safran Foer. Snip seven letters from the title Street of Crocodiles and you get Tree of Codes – and so on, for 134 intricately scissored pages. 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.

Foer 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. 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. 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.

Nevertheless, it may prove to be a shrewd career move. Foer doesn't need another bestseller, but he could do with a boost to his wobbly critical standing. Tree of Codes is a godsend to academics everywhere. 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. This objet d'art, composed substantially of empty spaces, is a conceptual must-have. If the masses can't relate to it, intellectuals may see all the more reason to concur with Vanity Fair's judgment that it's "very, very cool".

At fewer than 3,000 words, it's a quick read – half your time will be taken up with turning the pages ever-so-gingerly and inserting a blank sheet behind each so as not to be distracted by the layers beneath – but it's surprisingly absorbing. I enjoyed it more than I expected to, even allowing for the fact that I love Schulz's story-cycle. Reading Tree of Codes without reference to the original, you may conclude that Foer has conjured beautiful new images from every page. Comparing the two texts paragraph by paragraph, you notice quite often that what seems like an audacious coinage is already there in the original; Foer has merely excised hunks of Schulz's luxuriant verbiage and exhibited a slimmed-down version of the master's vision.

But what about the more radical potentials of the cut-up technique, as pioneered by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs? To be fair, Tree of Codes also contains plenty of instances where Foer combines words and phrases from genuinely unconnected sentences in felicitous new ways: "August painted the air with a mop. Hours pass in coughs"; "in the depth of the grayness, weeks passed like boats waiting to sail into the starless dawn"; "the gale seemed to explode dead colours onto the unkempt sky." Such thrilling juxtapositions confirm that while Foer's instincts as a novelist are questionable, his instincts as a poet are sound. Excising all mention of birds in Schulz's "The Birds", he co-opts the language to refer instead to the narrator's father, finally characterising him as "an enormous featherless dignity". What a phrase! Elsewhere, the father's megalomaniac rant in "A Treatise on Mannequins" is transformed into something gentler, an aching, inarticulate expression of all humanity's frustrated hope: "We wish. We wish; we want, we want we want –" "'We are not,' he said."

Poetry aside, does Tree of Codes function as fiction? Sort of. Schulz's own book – typically Polish – is a rich stew of metaphysical mischief and meditations, with little plot engine other than the father's slow decline into madness. Tree of Codes, while following the ghostly outline of this same narrative, pursues divergent agendas. The sexual dynamic is altered, for example. Schulz's terrifying account of his papa's unhealthy obsession with work becomes, in Foer's reinvention, an obsession with the all-consuming female: "he would spend whole days in bed, surrounded by Mother. he became almost insane with mother. he was absorbed, lost, in an enormous shadow. his eyes darkened and suffering spread." It's as if Foer's scalpeling of the text is a kind of psychoanalysis, seeking to expose the unacknowledged fixations hidden within (although which author's fixations are being exposed is a moot point). Foer's narrative also discards much of Schulz's domestic, autobiographical detail and much of his pessimism, aiming for the bigger historical picture, and journeying more determinedly towards a transcendent ending. Unsurprisingly, given Foer's past works, there are passages evoking innocence overwhelmed by social catastrophe, hints of the Holocaust that killed Schulz before he was able to write about such things himself.

All very interesting, but I suspect that this book will be appraised more as an artefact than as a story. And, as an artefact, the most remarkable thing about Tree of Codes is how very fragile it is. Foer has claimed that the decision to produce it as a paperback was forced by necessity, because "if it were a hardback it would collapse in on itself". That may be so, but the book's lack of a tough shell makes it seem all the more vulnerable to mutilation. Just one rake of the fingers would destroy it. Those booksellers brave enough to stock it will no doubt be chewing their lower lips in stress whenever a customer leafs through its delicate web of pages. Yet, knowing Bruno Schulz's life story, there is poignancy in this. His oeuvre, which should have been large, was hacked down to modest size by tragic misfortune: his murder by the Nazis, followed by the loss of hundreds of his paintings, drawings and manuscripts. The idea of The Street of Crocodiles surviving in disguise, chopped to within an inch of its life but still clinging to its soul, strikes me as a bittersweet irony, an oddly fitting homage. It has also given rise to the most potent work of art that Jonathan Safran Foer has yet produced.

Michel Faber's The Fire Gospel is published by Canongate.

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