<![CDATA[House of Leaves]]>

false <![CDATA[House of Leaves]]> 24800 11 Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves. Mark Z. Danielewski's first novel has a lot going on: notably the discovery of a pseudoacademic monograph called The Navidson Record, written by a blind man named Zampanò, about a nonexistent documentary film--which itself is about a photojournalist who finds a house that has supernatural, surreal qualities. (The inner dimensions, for example, are measurably larger than the outer ones.) In addition to this Russian-doll layering of narrators, Danielewski packs in poems, scientific lists, collages, Polaroids, appendices of fake correspondence and "various quotes," single lines of prose placed any which way on the page, crossed-out passages, and so on. Now that we've reached the post-postmodern era, presumably there's nobody left who needs liberating from the strictures of conventional fiction. So apart from its narrative high jinks, what does House of Leaves have to offer? According to Johnny Truant, the tattoo-shop apprentice who discovers Zampanò's work, once you read The Navidson Record, <blockquote> For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. </blockquote> We'll have to take his word for it, however. As it's presented here, the description of the spooky film isn't continuous enough to have much scare power. Instead, we're pulled back into Johnny Truant's world through his footnotes, which he uses to discharge everything in his head, including the discovery of the manuscript, his encounters with people who knew Zampanò, and his own battles with drugs, sex, ennui, and a vague evil force. If The Navidson Record is a mad professor lecturing on the supernatural with rational-seeming conviction, Truant's footnotes are the manic student in the back of the auditorium, wigged out and furiously scribbling whoa-dude notes about life. Despite his flaws, Truant is an appealingly earnest amateur editor--finding translators, tracking down sources, pointing out incongruities. Danielewski takes an academic's--or ex-academic's--glee in footnotes (the similarity to David Foster Wallace is almost too obvious to mention), as well as other bogus ivory-tower trappings such as interviews with celebrity scholars like Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom. And he stuffs highbrow and pop-culture references (and parodies) into the novel with the enthusiasm of an anarchist filling a pipe bomb with bits of junk metal. House of Leaves may not be the prettiest or most coherent collection, but if you're trying to blow stuff up, who cares? --John Ponyicsanyi 856555 book 6 7 2000 House of Leaves total:9059|5:4120|4:2569|3:1502|2:552|1:316| 9059 36802 15283 1806 2 130 false false Sat Dec 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Fri Dec 14 14:28:56 -0800 2007 Mon Sep 15 15:29:12 -0700 2008 1
House of Leaves is a really, really damn good story. It's about a guy named Johnny Truant who finds a manuscript in a dead man's apartment. Said manuscript is entitled the Navidson Record. It's essentially a dissertati...more...]]> 5 75 false false Tue Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2002 Sat Jun 23 01:59:52 -0700 2007 Sat Jun 23 02:20:20 -0700 2007
Here's a little anecdote that speaks to the possibilities of this book:

I was an RA my junior and senior years of college. One year I had a good friend of mine ...more...]]> 4 21 false false Mon Oct 19 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Mon May 18 10:23:46 -0700 2009 Mon Oct 19 05:48:50 -0700 2009 Photobucket

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At this point I’m tempted to just link to Tadpole’s excellent review and call it a day, but I really feel as though I should say something. After all,...more...]]> 5 20 false false Sun Oct 19 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Aug 31 11:16:45 -0700 2008 Sun Oct 19 22:03:18 -0700 2008
This quote that I have taken completely out of context is probably the best one sentence summary of this book that is possible within the fractured confines of human communicati...more...]]> 3 14 false false Wed Sep 26 14:28:29 -0700 2007 Wed Nov 18 08:28:53 -0800 2009 more...]]> 1 12 false false Mon Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Tue Nov 27 05:44:38 -0800 2007 Tue Nov 27 05:59:56 -0800 2007
After reading it I could not disagree more.

The story is this: a family m...more...]]> 1 11 false false Thu Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2007 Thu Sep 13 12:56:15 -0700 2007 Thu Sep 20 23:56:08 -0700 2007 more...]]> 3 10 false false Tue Jan 13 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Mon Jan 12 21:18:25 -0800 2009 Mon Jan 12 21:51:14 -0800 2009
The Johnny Truant arc feels like a long Palahniuk-style cliche of debauch...more...]]> 3 5 false false Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Tue Jan 08 14:35:34 -0800 2008 Tue Jan 08 14:44:57 -0800 2008
Johnny acquires a stack of papers written by an old man named Zampano, who recently died. Johnny realizes ...more...]]> 5 7 false false Sun Apr 23 00:00:00 -0700 2006 Fri Aug 15 14:49:20 -0700 2008 Fri Aug 15 14:49:45 -0700 2008
* Layer 1: Photojournalist Will Navid...more...]]> 4 4 false false Mon Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Thu Sep 20 11:34:30 -0700 2007 Tue Oct 09 15:12:48 -0700 2007
I'm beginning to dabble with the experimental novel--and I say "dabble" because I haven't finished one yet. I started reading The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, this summer but only got about 130 pages in. Yesterday I got a bit deepe...more...]]> 1 10 false false Fri Sep 14 05:04:17 -0700 2007 Fri Mar 07 05:34:51 -0800 2008 more...]]> 5 4 false false Wed Jan 16 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Sat Aug 25 02:21:38 -0700 2007 Wed Jan 16 14:00:41 -0800 2008 more...]]> 5 5 false false Fri Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Tue Jun 26 13:22:44 -0700 2007 Tue Jun 26 13:33:05 -0700 2007
Okay. Fullst...more...]]> 1 6 false false Thu Sep 04 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Tue Aug 19 14:37:30 -0700 2008 Thu Sep 04 14:29:03 -0700 2008 I found the story throughout all the fuss...more...]]> 3 7 false false Mon Mar 30 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Mon Mar 30 07:46:05 -0700 2009 Tue Mar 31 06:36:45 -0700 2009
"House of Leaves" was my first foray into "post-modern" literature (1). I have to admit that this book "beat" me. I couldn't finish it (2). I was able to finish most of it, though, so I have a good idea of what...more...]]> 4 4 false false Mon Jul 16 00:58:00 -0700 2007 Wed Feb 27 03:05:59 -0800 2008 5 11 false false Wed Aug 26 16:10:30 -0700 2009 Fri Oct 23 10:01:14 -0700 2009 more...]]> 1 5 false false Tue Oct 07 14:48:02 -0700 2008 Thu Oct 16 14:49:28 -0700 2008 House of Leaves is pretentious. It does things against the grain just because they haven't been done before, not because they're necessarily good ideas. The book seems to take pride in trying its damnedest to give you a headache, and then expects you to like it (unless Danielewsk...more...]]> http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=24800