House of Leaves | Mark Z. Danielewski | An engaging and clever read

House of Leaves | Mark Z. Danielewski | If nothing else, provides material for good discussions

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House of Leaves

	House of Leaves Mark Z. Danielewski Pantheon, 2000 - 709 pages average customer review:based on 582 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.

Now, for the first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices.

The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

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An engaging and clever read

I bought this book after reading the xkcd comic (http://xkcd.com/472/) and was very glad I did. I'm not going into a plot summary, if you want one you can check out wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves). Instead, I'm going to briefly discuss the style of the book and address the complaints I've read in other reviews.

I'm not sure how someone can find the plot of The Navidson Record boring. Yes, it's true that there are essentially academic papers scattered throughout the text, sometimes up to a chapter long. First of all I think that these texts, no matter how boring some may find them, are an important part of the story--they are Zampano's writings and add to the depth of his character. And while they are not essential to the text, I found them interesting to read, and it gave me something to think about, some lens with which to view the story once the book returned to the central plot. The author (although I can't remember whether it was Johnny Truant or Zampano, let's just say Danielewski) even comments that you are allowed to skip parts of the text if you so desire. If you don't want to read a 20+ page paper on "echo", then skip it, or skim through it.

Another comment was that the requisite book-rotating detracted from the experience. I loved all the sections that were like this, and felt they added to the experience. Without giving away the plot, you become disoriented as one of the character does, even forgetting which way to turn the pages as the character struggles to find his way through the house. There is a level of reader-participation required, but if you do pay attention to the intricate formatting it will connect you closer to the characters in the book and how they feel.

Finally, on the subject of the footnotes. Yes, a lot of them are unnecessary, and I could see how it would be distracting to read a multi-page footnote and then try to return to the story. So don't!!! Continue with the text and at the end of the chapter come back to one of Johnny Truant's stories. I don't see why this is so difficult for some people.

In summation this is a great book, and if you put some effort into it you may start to wonder if perhaps the things Johnny Truant undergoes are happening to you. And if you're paying attention, you'll certainly get a kick out of a few of the more clever moments (some of my favorites were pages 168, 192, most of chapter 15, 467).

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If nothing else, provides material for good discussions

A book about a book written by an old man about a movie that never was, compiled by a young man with a psychotic mother and a broken life. It's a rich universe contained in a single volume, and it is amazing as long as you forget that none of it is real.

Doubtlessly, people will be drawn to one or both of the substories within. People who compared it to the Blaire-Witch focuses on the fictitious movie, The Navidson Project. Others enjoy how life mirrors art, as Johnny Truant's life is reflected in the House, which in turn reflects those that live within.

To me, the most important question a lover of literature can ask of this book is : where does its merit come from?

To me, respectable works contribute in one of two ways, they either elevate the beauty of the language, or they synthesize what comes before them. For instance, Lolita by Nabokov has been described as the author's love affair with English. A ground breaking thesis by Hawking or Newton synthesize the theories and observations of those in the past. Shakespeare was in a unique position to do both. Many of his most famous plays were rewrites of past works - he just happened to be the most eloquent person to write it then, and ever since.

Experimental fiction like the House of Leaves are experimental because they do not fall neatly into either camp. This comes from a dominant theme in the genre of breaking the boundary between reader and book. The relationship of Johnny with The Navidson Project is analogous to us readers as we go through this book. We are drawn in, all the while fascinated by the absurdity of believing so much in the reality of the fiction. In a way, it's a statement of our perception of reality itself - break it down far enough and we only find bits of our dreams and imaginations. Conversely, when fiction piless upon itself exponentially, reality is born.

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A strange book

House of LeavesThis is an unusual book. The story is a thriller or a horror, it depends. The most important characteristic of this book is "how it is written..." you can find: blank pages, pages with only a word, upside down pages, coloured words, landscape oriented pages, mirrored pages(!) and so on, very very unusual and amusing way to write a book. I love it, it is so strange.....and mysterious. You will enjoy reading this book.

Complex and Unique, But Very Hard to Read

Mark Z. Danielewski, the author, does some very complex and interesting things.

Much of his book is supposed to be a mock-academic treatise written by a strange, blind man. The academic text is heavily footnoted, and while some of the footnotes are by the blind man, Danielewski suggests that others were written by a mentally-unstable man, a tattoo-shop employee who found the academic treatise after its blind author died. Many of these footnotes go on for many pages, are written in a wild, sometimes incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness style, and are meant to detail the tattoo-employee's descent into madness as he becomes increasingly obsessed with the blind man's academic treatise.

Are you following this so far? It's a pretty complex book. But its authors' oddities don't stop there!

At several points in the book, the footnotes go wild, involving incredibly long lists of names, appearing in all sorts of places on the page, and sometimes even appearing as mirror images. At several other points in the book, only a few lines of text appear per page. In other parts, text runs diagonally down the page, rather than left to right, or text appears in a clump, or words take up most of a line, etc. etc. etc.

I don't feel like I'm giving too much away, here. You'd notice this much if you just quickly paged through the book.

And, amazingly, all of these wild visual variations make complete sense, and coincide very well with the stories being told in the mock-academic treatise. Sometimes the text's appearance gives the impression of a labyrinth, sometimes it gives the impression of climbing, and so on.

Notice, so far, I haven't even given any real idea of the book's story or plot! The book might be considered a horror; after all, the academic treatise is (roughly speaking) about a scary house that holds a tremendous labyrinth. Or it might be considered a love story; it's about the relationships described by the academic treatise and the tattoo-employee. Overall, it's a very complex book. If I said much more, I'd be at risk of giving up too much of its game.

So why, if the book is so interesting, did I only give it a three star ranking? It was incredibly difficult to read! The blind man's academic treatise reads, at times, like a ridiculous but very dry treatise, filled with meaningless citations and fake quotations from scholars. The tattoo-employee's footnotes are crazy. Written in a stream-of-consciousness style, they sometimes seem poorly written, and often go off on nearly incomprehensible jags. Further, in this book, you can't always read the text from left to right, as is typical. Sometimes you have to read up or down the page. And that takes effort.

In general, all of the author's stylistic, visual, and content-driven oddities were rather distracting. It took me months to finish, and I rarely read more than ten or twenty pages at a time. It was too much effort for a book I was hoping would be fun.

Still, I give it credit. The author does do some very complex and interesting things.

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