When you devour 700+ pages in less than twenty-four hours and your dreams take a turn of such tangential oddness that a careful consideration of the themes involved leads you somewhat surprisingly, yet inexorably, back to the bound stack of paper that first entered your awareness as Mark Z. Danielewki’s House of Leaves; well, when that happens . . . you know that you’ve encountered something special.
This book has been haunting the back of my mind, and while I still feel like anything other than another five or six readings and a few years of taking notes will come miserably short of the full import of what Danielewski spent the better part of ten years constructing; all the same I do have to write this review.
Title: House of Leaves : The Remastered Full-Color Edition
Author: Mark Z. Danielewski
LC Rating:
Well ok; I don’t have to, but “Holy Shit! You’ve got to read this book!” And now that I’ve gushed, I can warn you that this thing is dense, and it does not obey any of the laws that you are used to when it comes to the presentation of a story - in text - upon the page.
To attempt something that I could call summary:
An old man dies, a young man finds his trunk which contains a scholarly book written about a movie that never existed, a book which debates the plausibility and potential meaning of a ‘Blair-Witch’ style horror film. The text of the old man’s book is presented to us, full of footnotes to other scholarly works about said horror film and the young man lives in the introduction and in a series of his own footnotes; where he reacts to the book that he is reading, and relates how it is sending him into a strange sort of madness. Then of course we also have his mother’s letters to him in the form of an Appendix, one of several. Oh yeah, did I mention that every time the word house appears it is written in blue? Did I mention the times when you have to turn the book upside down, sideways and occasionally at an angle to continue reading? Did I mention the series of pages with footnotes spanning multiple pages, presented inside a blue frame, where the footnote from the page before is reproduced as if it had bled thru and was visible from the other side?
Did I must mention that you are more than willing to wade thru all of this?
What is truly remarkable about House of Leaves is how normal all of this experimentation comes to seem. The very worst of the confusion comes during a point of the story where the action being described is extremely claustrophobic, and perfectly matched to the mental barrage of too much, almost impossible to take in, information that the physical page presents you with. When the action speeds up; a page may contain no more than a paragraph, and the act of flipping pages matched the fevered pace of the action. As you turn the book upside down, you are utterly dislocated in physical and mental space. Wow.
At the heart of the book is this film that, as the introduction makes perfectly clear, does not exist even within the world of the novel. Within this movie, whose plot we come to understand as the old man’s book continues to pick away at the multiple interpretations that the world (which world? the world of the story within the story within perhaps another story, and thanks to the power of its central idea . . . ultimately our world) has drawn from having seen the film, and studied it. There’s this ‘house’ within a house, which really shouldn’t be there, since it goes against all the laws of physics, and as the interior of the ‘house’ is explored, you are presented with a series of ideas and images which fit quite well right across the very nature of the human mind, among other things.
By the time I was furiously searching thru each appendix looking for clues and reflected meanings, I knew that this was a book I had to own and read at least a few more times.
October 3rd, 2006 at 7:06 pm
i’d be interested to hear some other theories as to whether his mother (what was “his” name? johnny something? it’s been a minute since i read it) did actually exist or not, and what people think their relationship was.
fairly fascinating and fully frieghtening.