Hello!
Welcome to day two of Book Worm Week!
After looking at such a dense and heady text as Murakami's Windup Bird Chronicle yesterday, what would you say to switching gears completely, to something like a total inversion of that experience? Instead of an emotionally driven tale of a lonely man's search for identity in the world while dealing with dream-obsessed psychic prostitutes in a doorstop of a novel, how about a pop-culture influencing, quick read that almost makes a game out of the reading experience - would that pique your interest? Good, because today we're looking at House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski.
Published back around the turn of the millennium, House of Leaves could be the very definition of a post-modern book, one that is just as much about the book itself as it is about what happens both in and on the page. On the surface (which is a statement, in and of itself) the plot is as follows: a young man working at an LA tattoo parlor named Johnny Truant is told about a vacant apartment for rent, whose previous tenant was a blind old man named Zampano. In the old man's belongings they find a book the man apparently dictated, the subject of which was a film called The Navidson Record. As Truant begins to edit and assemble a workable copy of the book from the scraps and fragments left by Zampano, the tale of The Navidson Record takes over. The Navidson record was a (possibly) fictional movie the documented a family whose home suddenly gains a large closet it hadn't previously held. The patriarch of the family, (fictional) famed photographer Will Navidson, begins an obsessive quest to document the exact measurements of the house, finding it to be exactly 1/4 inch larger on the inside than the outside. This discrepancy begins to consume him, and when there appears a doorway on the living room wall which opens into a corridor that exists seemingly in hammer space, he begins to explore it.
So to recap - a book about a book about a movie about a strange and impossible labyrinth.
As I stated at the beginning of the post, the book is a poster child for the modern non-book, a work with multiple levels of interpretation and meta-contextually that becomes a winding, inescapable journey into the author's mind. In a cheeky move, the book itself is 1/4 inch larger than the cover, the pages jutting out intentionally. The text inside changes fonts, sizes and formats, depending both on the narrating character and the context of the action. Passages of prose are broken up by poems, which are footnoted; these footnotes often contain there own footnotes, at times telling entirely capsular stories of their own. As the reader reaches the point of Navidson exploring the labyrinth in his home, the text shifts and twists around the page, reflecting the alien nature of the story and the sub-protagonist's perspective. It's fascinating but at times it makes it either impossibly off putting or entirely engrossing. When fleeing sounds in the darkness in the labyrinth, the text becomes small, claustrophobic blocks, forcing the reader to rapidly flip pages to keep up, as though running along side the action. When lost miles beneath the house, the text circles back around in isolated boxes that are upside down in other chapters, highlighting the impossible physics and skewing the reader's sense of perspective. Text changes color at times randomly, other times quite intentionally for specific phrases and words.
To be candid, though, I found this to be simultaneously inspired logic yet it absolutely withdrew me from the reading experience. I found myself wistfully thinking, at times, how nice it would have been to simply have the straight text of The Navidson Film in a standard book format - the idea of inner-space being more extensive than outer-space was fascinating and (I felt) at times fumbled by Danielewski. What could have made for a disturbing and haunting tale becomes, instead, a case of 'look how clever I am' exercises in an author's debut work. It felt like at times the book would reach out and slap me if it had hands, just to defy the typical reading experience.
I say all this, yet I still have read the book more than once. I can bag on the post-modern theatrics that Danielewski foists upon the reader and yet I still adore the central concept on display. This no doubt has ties to my love of the Silent Hill series, which has often featured long and winding passages that don't exist in reality yet force the player through them in effectively disorienting sequences. As much as I love the adventure of the characters getting lost somewhere in the walls of the house, it is, at it's heart, a book about a married couple clutching each other's hands as their relationship stumbles. I didn't realize it until my second read through (with some internet-assisted hand-holding) that the book has just as much of a focus on the characters as it does the house itself. Johnny Truant's crumbling mind and Will Navidson's obsessions fuel the plot developments in such a deft and sly manner that it adds another layer to an already massively choreographed work - you don't notice it as you read about a 'haunted house' but it's the character's you're becoming unknowingly invested in, not the labyrinth.
It's divisive, it's notorious, it's over a decade old and still post-modern. House of Leaves is strange and wonderful journey that is fundamentally unlike anything else I've ever read. I would highly suggest you track down a copy and see what you find. Book Worm Week continues tomorrow with another abrupt change in style - stay tuned!
Welcome to day two of Book Worm Week!
After looking at such a dense and heady text as Murakami's Windup Bird Chronicle yesterday, what would you say to switching gears completely, to something like a total inversion of that experience? Instead of an emotionally driven tale of a lonely man's search for identity in the world while dealing with dream-obsessed psychic prostitutes in a doorstop of a novel, how about a pop-culture influencing, quick read that almost makes a game out of the reading experience - would that pique your interest? Good, because today we're looking at House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski.
So to recap - a book about a book about a movie about a strange and impossible labyrinth.
As I stated at the beginning of the post, the book is a poster child for the modern non-book, a work with multiple levels of interpretation and meta-contextually that becomes a winding, inescapable journey into the author's mind. In a cheeky move, the book itself is 1/4 inch larger than the cover, the pages jutting out intentionally. The text inside changes fonts, sizes and formats, depending both on the narrating character and the context of the action. Passages of prose are broken up by poems, which are footnoted; these footnotes often contain there own footnotes, at times telling entirely capsular stories of their own. As the reader reaches the point of Navidson exploring the labyrinth in his home, the text shifts and twists around the page, reflecting the alien nature of the story and the sub-protagonist's perspective. It's fascinating but at times it makes it either impossibly off putting or entirely engrossing. When fleeing sounds in the darkness in the labyrinth, the text becomes small, claustrophobic blocks, forcing the reader to rapidly flip pages to keep up, as though running along side the action. When lost miles beneath the house, the text circles back around in isolated boxes that are upside down in other chapters, highlighting the impossible physics and skewing the reader's sense of perspective. Text changes color at times randomly, other times quite intentionally for specific phrases and words.
It's divisive, it's notorious, it's over a decade old and still post-modern. House of Leaves is strange and wonderful journey that is fundamentally unlike anything else I've ever read. I would highly suggest you track down a copy and see what you find. Book Worm Week continues tomorrow with another abrupt change in style - stay tuned!
