By: Mark Z. Danielewski Publisher: Pantheon Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 709 Publication Date: March 07, 2000 Release Date: March 07, 2000 Studio: Pantheon
Amazon.com Review: 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,
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.
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
Product Description: This book, Mark Z. Danielewski's experimental first novel, has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, which aims to recogise and reward new writing across fiction and non-fiction. A special report featuring reviews, extracts and online resources for all the titles, plus talkboards and an online poll can be found
Boring, pretentious, and about as edgy as a marshmallow. ^ There's nothing wrong with this book that couldn't have been fixed by having Steven King rewrite it as a short story. The central conceit (which I won't reveal here in case you go against my advice and read this book anyway) isn't a terrible idea, but Danielszewski doesn't do anything of interest with it. The framing story, filled with Johnny Whatshisface's hedonic adventures, might be titillating if you've lived in a church basement your entire life. I haven't.
Ultimately, just a first novel ^ All young writers should have good editors. The book is, like most first novels, fresh and interesting, but ultimately self-indulgent; replete with author intrusion, self-congratulatory cleverness, and a whole lotta time wasting. Character development is virtually nonexistent and the plot doesn't so much advance as trail off into some unexplored corner of the house of title fame.
People posting reviews who compare this book to Nabokov or Borges really should go back and re-read some actual Nabokov or Borges, either of whom can say more in a page than this writer can say in a hundred.
It's a nice try. It has some decent ideas. Postmodernists will probably like it, 'cause it's all so avant garde doncha know. But it really isn't a novel so much as somebody's writing journal accepted for publication. Read _Pale Fire_ or one of JL's parables, and save yourself a week.
The Emperor Has No Clothes ^ Do you like the funhouse at a carnival? Do you have trouble remembering that it isn't real? Are you genuinely surprised when a stuffed dummy pops up out of nowhere when you are actually expecting it? Congratulations, you will enjoy House of Leaves. If these things are a bit too childish or maybe just a little too cliche, House of Leaves will leave you rolling your eyes and a bit ashamed of yourself for thinking you've found something novel and brilliant. This becomes even more evident when you listen to others extolling its avant-garde format as brilliance or evidence of some superior intelligence at work. In short, the book is self-indulgent tripe wrapped in the shiny paper of brilliant formatting. After about 400 pages of coming up short on story, short on character development, mind-numbingly bored with obvious tricks of form, (not to mention the sheer waste of space and paper) then finally coming up on another one of those buried 'gotcha's...I became painfully aware that I had duped myself into thinking that there was a pony buried in there somewhere. In short, not embarrassed to say I took the back door out of the funhouse in search of a decent book. If someone tells me that they enjoyed it, I pat them on their head and smile indulgently. It's like watching a child discovering that yellow and blue make green.
What the--? ^ I chose to read this book based solely on its editorial reviews. It sounded different and potentially frightening, and I like that in a book.
I was not disappointed. The descriptions of the house and action of the novel which centered around the house sent my imagination to a very dark, unsettling place--as did some of the other occurrences surrounding Johnny Truant, the tortured character experiencing the story of the house along with the reader.
Those are the parts of House of Leaves that will really stick with me. The other parts, meaning the mostly fictitious academic mumbo-jumbo, were not as enthralling. Still, I read every single word. I was on the search for a deeper significance. I wasn't expecting the book to resolve everything nicely and neatly, or to make sense even, but I thought that experiencing the whole package would bring me a fuller appreciation of the work... it's like a poem; you don't just read the parts that make immediate sense. In the end, I'm still not sure if 75% of this book was really worth my time. But maybe it was. I might have to read it again to be sure.
I strongly recommend making a friend read this book along with you. That way, you'll have someone to constantly ask: "What the--?". I really wanted to ask a lot of people that after reading this book, but I don't know anyone else who has read it. And now I'm hesitant to recommend this book to anyone, because I'm still trying to decide what it was and if I liked it or not. In a way that makes me more able to empathize with the character Johnny Truant. We've been subjected to the same strange House of Leaves, and at least I'm not as messed up as him. I'm just kind of messed up.
As long as you're prepared, though, I'd give this book a chance. Be forewarned: It's not just about a house. It's really a story about a young man reading the manuscript of an old man which is an academic criticism and investigation of a fictional documentary which another man made about his messed-up house.
It's weird and somehow it gets to you. That's ultimately why I gave it four stars. I will never forget this book.
big stupid mess ^ I think this guy took everything he scribbled down for like ten years and compiled it into this big stack of nonsense. There is only one good idea, the kind of Twilight Zone-esque idea of a house with the mysteriously large closet, but oh no, you won't be reading much about that. Its about 98 percent gimmicky footnotes and pseudo-scholarly garbage (which the author himself pokes fun at in the book, but...its a main chunk of the book so whats the point of writing in a style for so many pages if he knows its no good).
The alternate story of Johnny Truant I'm convinced was a separate manuscript that I think the author decided to merge with the story of the house to... I don't know, make it longer? That story is crap as well. I aborted the expedition about 250 pages in, about 200 pages further than I should have gone. There was probably a solid short story to be found in there with the house but...needless to say, my mind was not blown.
Try Gravity's Rainbow instead if your looking for 700 pages of rambling that won't leave you feeling burned.
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