House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
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Book Reviews of House of Leaves
Book Review: Into the depths
Summary: 5 Stars
An astute reader can come to gauge a writer through what he produces. And if this is so for "House of Leaves, then Mark Danielewski is a swirling mixture of the mad and the magnificent. This book is unlike any other that I have ever read -- hard and surreal, strange and magnificent.Will Navidson moves into a house with a secret, a door that leads into a bizarre tangle of stairways and passages. After his experiences are put down in the Navidson Record, a blind man named Zampanò makes further studies of the house -- and then the tattoo artist Johnny Truant, after Zampanò's death.As the reader goes deeper into the house (the word "house" isusually printed in blue), reality and perception start to warp...
Trying to explain "House of Leaves" is like trying to explain "Mulholland Drive" in one sentence. Summarizing is hard enough; summarizing it briefly is virtually impossible. But if the actual story of "House of Leaves" is fantastic, then the way it's written is even better.It's sprinkled with anecdotes, letters (often with crossed-out lines), footnotes, lists, appendices, and pseudo-interview snippets from people like Anne Rice, Camille Paglia, David Copperfield, Stephen King, and Stanley Kubrick. There are pages that are entirely blotted out, or have only a single word, or are printed upside-down, sideways, tilted, running into a mess of letters, or in a spiral. There is poetry, pictures of tattered pages, musical notes, collages and paintings.
Danielewski's style is amazing. It's in flux -- some parts of it, in keeping with who wrote it, are dry and flat (Zampanò), and some are more casual (Truant). But as the book grows darker and more surreal, it doesn't alienate -- instead, it draws you in and warps how you see the world for just a little while, as if the book is reaching out of its pages to grab the reader's brain. Almost like the house, one might say.
The kind of terror and horror in "House of Leaves" are not the kind you read in hack horror books, where something transforms or a nasty thing leaps out of the shadows and eviscerates screaming extras. It's a creeping, subtle thing, like oil dripping over the surface of a pond. It's like a hallucination, surreal and continually shifting, where the laws of physics don't apply.
This genre-busting post-modernist book is like taking a rollercoaster through a Dali-designed funhouse. Alone in its genre, it's a work of art. It will scare you, twist you, and linger in your mind without cheap tricks or flashy devices. Astounding.
Book Review: Obscurely brilliant and brilliantly obscure
Summary: 5 Stars
Four-and-a-half stars, actually.
House of Leaves is a story within a story within another story, all part of yet another story. The main story (although I use that phrase cautiously) concerns the Navidson Record, the story of an impossible house complete with infinite and existential space. The Navidson Record was initially compiled by Zampano, a blind old man about whom little is known. Zampano's work is found and expanded upon by Johnny Truant, who also tells his own story along in the way. Finally, in the extensive appendices, we find the Whalestoe Letters, written by Johnny's mother, which offers yet another fractured view of the Navidson Record and its surrounding stories, bringing into question the reality and meaning of everything in House of Leaves.
I enjoyed this book immensely, despite a slow start. At first I worried that it was somewhat pretentious, and that some of the tricks used-the extensive footnotes that often overlap each other, the shifting nature of the text, and the clues and hints hidden throughout-got to be too much. However, as I read on I saw (at least in my opinion) how it all fit together.
The existential nothingness of the house could be over-analyzed on an intellectual level; it could be catalogued in hopes of a pattern emerging; it could be explored pointlessly even though all that such explorations would reveal is oneself; it could be interpreted on any number of levels from different perspectives and methods; and, finally, it could be ignored or even feared, left merely as a mystery. And yet it still was it was.
I liked the core story about the house and I grew to like the other stories that layered upon it. At first, I thought Johnny's story was just sex, drugs, and working at a tattoo shop, but then I saw more of who he was and how what he did was a part of the whole. (For me one of the best parts of the book was when Johnny cited a list of Lude's sexual conquests within a month-and then turned that list around to reveal possible backgrounds of abuse and personal problems for all those women.)
One thing I didn't share with other readers was that I didn't find the book at all scary, but more fascinating. It was a treasure hunt for me, a work I had to figure out while at the same time following along as a reader. I would say, though, that people looking for a straightforward story should not read House of Leaves. Those looking for something different, something to consume your time and thoughts, should read the book immediately.
Book Review: A Highbrow Oubliette of Surreal Horror
Summary: 5 Stars
Rather than overlapping some of the extensive summaries already posted, I'll zoom out and try to offer a helpful observation for the benefit of some of my fellow literati out there ... one that might help you decide to buy this book if you're still undecided. This isn't really a spoiler per se, but for those who dislike even borderline spoilers, stop reading this review now.
As best I can tell, the title "House of Leaves" is something of a multi-layered metaphorical pun. The first pun is that in older English, the pages of a book used to be called "leaves", so in effect, a book is a house built of leaves, or sheafs, of paper. The second metaphorical pun concerns the house whose story the book relates. One way to look at the Navidson house is as a metaphorical embodiment of Yggdrasil (feel free to Wikki that) - the dimension spanning World Ash Tree of Norse Mythology ... another "house of leaves" if you will. Yggdrasil's branches spanned and connected all the known realms and dimensions, and it's roots extended down into depths of hell (where foul demonic creatures, including the corpse-eating niddhogg dragon, gnawed eternally on it's roots) and also into the magical pools of the Norns, and into the well of mimir (into which Wotan cast one of his eyes in order to gain vision into the hidden mysteries of the universe and the future). It was upon a branch of yggdrasil that Odin carved his Spear of Law, Gungir, upon which all the treaties that held the known realms together were carved.
So ... as with yggdrasil and gungir, this "house of leaves" tale interweaves the lives and perspectives and recorded accounts of everyone it touches, and travelling the tree takes (re: the staircase and closet expeditions) takes one on a long twisting nightmare expedition into unplumbed depths into otherworldly dimensions beyond the ken of mortal sanity.
Feeling a little confused and intimidated ? Good. That's what the author intended. ;-)
Anyway, the book has become a post-modernist classic of high-brow surreal horror, and has gathered something of a cult following. I enjoyed it immensely. It's a great escapist mindbender, replete with overlapping changes of perspective, codes and obscure literary references. Highly recommended ... especially for those like me who are devout readers with wide-ranging tastes.
Book Review: Not yet ready for this book.
Summary: 5 Stars
When the name House of Leaves first reached my ears, I was just beginning the transition from junior high to high school. A family friend had suggested this book to me, saying it was one of the greatest books he had read. When I asked my friend what the book was about, he answered with this simple summary: it's about a house that's bigger on the inside than the outside; however, my friend was quite wrong. It's really about much more than that.
The plot of this book is far too complicated to explain, but I can give you a little idea of it. This book is about a man named Johnny Truant who finds a stack of papers badly bound together in the home of an old blind man named Zampanó. Truant soon finds that the book is a description of a home-made documentary called The Navidson Record. The Navidson Record is about a man named Will Navidson who moves into a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. As Navidson explores his house more and more, he is overcome with its mystery and is tossed into the darkness and immensity of its hallways. But that is only a minor description; to really understand this book you have to read it for yourself.
Not only was this book amazingly well-written, but the visual power that the book held-- with its stricken out passages, blank pages, and the good, old-fashioned, upside-down and backwards text--made it all the better. Danielewski's characters are well-developed and very real. Each of the characters has a fascinating back-story, and they all seem like actual people, leaving the reader wondering if it's all more than a story.
Even though I fell completely in love with this story, there were those occasional times when I seriously thought about putting it down. Many times in House of Leaves the reader will have to endure mind-numbing rants about a character's past or a rant on Norse mythology. However, if you can pull yourself through these dull spots, you will be greeted by a great story with a spectacular finish.
I did love this book, but I don't think I had the reading skills needed to fully comprehend it. I recommend this book to you only if you are an avid reader with a lot of patience and a lot of time. This book will take a while to read and has incredibly hard language. When I first opened this book, I was not nearly ready for what it held, so for now, House of Leaves will go back on my shelf waiting until I am truly ready to read it.
Book Review: Minotaur
Summary: 5 Stars
I first heard about this book through a friend of a friend--he had found the novel in a trash can while walking around with friends at 2:00a.m. down in Texas and picked it up. That alone intrigued me to read this book, and it certainly didn't disappoint. I devoured it in about a week and a half, spending my entire spring break reading in the car, in my bedroom (during the daytime), and at friends' houses. It grabbed me, set up shop in my head, and didn't leave until I read it cover-to-cover.
One of the key aspects of the novel is a notion that personally scares the living daylights out of me: a house that defies all physics as we know it. What was so terrifying to me was that it started small, with two extra inches of space inside the Navidson house than outside. "It must have been a slip-up," they figured, "or we bent the tape measure." But of course that's never the case, and the house proceeded to shift and grow as fluidly as water. When a building can read your emotions, can reach into your thoughts and feed off of whatever you're thinking about, you as a homeowner lose all power and all assumptions that you are in charge. The house became as wild and as unpredictable as Mother Nature--except it could think.
Danielewski is a literary genius. The thoughts and ideas behind this novel are so beyond my comprehension that his mind could only have been working at a thousand miles per hour to produce it, and what was born was priceless and something that can never be mimicked. It is, essentially, a story within a story inside a story. He writes the 3 different points of view--Johnny Truant, Zampano, and the Navidsons themselves--flawlessly, never faltering or hinting that any of the three knows that the others exist. And Johnny's slow but devastating unravelling is hypnotizing, and was the biggest hook that kept me turning page after page. As readers, we find ourselves becoming Johnny Truant, glancing over our shoulders and turning on the overhead light just so that no stray shadows can bounce around. It is certainly not a novel for the faint of heart or for the sensitive; the sexuality is graphic and beautifully raw, and the horror aspects that are unexplained are far more ghastly than the ones that are. Are we as humans responsible for the nightmares that chase us during the night? Or is there really something living inside our walls, be it a minotaur or the house itself? We never really know, and that's what keeps this book fresh in my mind 11 months later.