The missing portion represents the huge amount of Schulz’s work lost to the chaos of the Second World War, despite his best efforts: Schulz, a Jew living in what was Poland, left various unpublished works with gentile friends none survived. He also provided a Foreword to the Penguin US edition of Schulz’s book.)įoer’s act of erasure, in cutting out the vast bulk of Schulz’s text, has a definite political dimension. (You can learn more from the horses’ mouths in these two pieces: Phillips in The Independent, Foer in The Guardian – Foer’s piece is more or less his Afterword to the actual book.
Whereas Phillips picked his at random (walking into a secondhand bookshop in 1966 and picking the first Victorian novel he came across costing 3p), Foer claims to have settled, after some time pondering the possibility of making a die-cut book, on a longstanding personal favourite: Bruno Schulz’s set of linked short stories Street Of Crocodiles. That germ began its progress with the selection of a book to deface. The same germ of an idea results in two vastly different reading experiences. The one emphasizes the elimination of the edited material, the other overcompensates for its absence with a rich visual layer that moves between the figurative and the abstract, the obviously illustrational and the joyously arbitrary. In the cases of those three generations of Bloch men, technology facilitates being somewhere other than in one's life.A Humument, on the left, Tree of Codes, on the rightīoth pieces start from the same premise – that by selecting occasional words from a pre-existing text, you can discover (or, more fancifully, excavate) a new narrative from inside the old – but their means of execution are intriguingly different.įoer cuts out the unwanted text – literally so, making holes in the pages – while Phillips paints over it. Sam, his eldest son, spends much of his free time in the virtual world of "Other Life." And Jacob's father, Irv, is a kind of xenophobic lawn sprinkler, shooting off his every opinion-and some opinions he probably doesn't actually have-by means of his blog. Technology is used in the book not in order to comment on expression, but as a means for characters to be "elsewhere." Jacob conducts a fantasy life through his phone, but also by browsing real estate ads on the Internet and imagining lives he knows he'll never live. You're probably asking the wrong person, though, as I don't use Snapchat or emoticons. Sometimes it feels worse, or at least shallower.
Sometimes it feels better, or at least easier. You're probably aski …more We express ourselves differently. Jonathan Safran Foer We express ourselves differently.
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