House of Leaves : A novel

Rating:
Summary: a dark book with no bottom
Review: i am not sure that this book makes any sense.*

* but Johnny and Lude are pretty kewl. :)

Rating:
Summary: A huge, sad dissapointment
Review: After all the hype and all the raving reviews posted here I was expecting a wonderful, innovative and daring novel. What I found, however, was a dull and boring exercise in what seems to be a certain "culture of cool" kind of fashion products that gather almost fanatical cheering at the beginning and then dissappear as the next big thing comes. As I finished the novel, I though I smelled a Quentin Tarantino here. Slick package, some clever bits, yes. The triumph here is a triumph of marketing, design and hype spin. I wanted very much to like this book, but ultimately I found that not only the characters, the plot and the ideas here were re-heated material borrowed from other sources and guilded with a sheen of snobbery, but it guilty of the worst sin: BORING. Profoundly so. It bears it "deepness", "daring" and "innovation" like a press release for the Grammy Awards. Surely, this is the sort of thing that passes, at least for 15 minutes, as a masterpiece in the age of publicity and pandering, but my advice would be, before investing in this product, at least take the time to read a couple of chapters in your local library. The dedication, in a flashy, shallow display of coolness, reads "This is not for you". Well, I'm afraid it is, very much so. I bet advertising execs in Manhattan think this looks so cool on the cofffee table. Sorry about the sarcasm. Every book merits the respect of the effort put into it. I'm sure that once this author outlives his status as the dear of the publicity department, he'll move on to write something that goes beyond plastic and Details magazine "deep art".

Rating:
Summary: Good, but a notch below the Pantheon
Review: Unless I missed it, nobody here has mentioned Nabokov as a precursor: "Pale Fire" is the urtext novel in which manic annotation wrestles with the work being annotated (and PF may be the only novel whose index itself is a comic masterpiece). "House of Leaves" is ambitious in different ways, but Danielewski doesn't have quite the same control over his material or his language. And he makes annoying mistakes: his calculation of how far a quarter would fall for an hour forgets to take wind resistance into account, he thinks Old English words derive from Old Norse and Gothic, he calls University of Virginia's Thornton Hall, across the street from me, "Thorton Hall"... of course the metafictional escape clause is that these are Zampono's errors, or Johnny Truant's, but that's too cheap a Get Out Of Jail Free card for my taste... Who lives by the Sterne/Joyce/Pynchon mode falls short by it too. --That said, I think the narrative of Navidson and the house itself is stunningly successful. In fact the impossible house is a lot more believable than Johnny Truant, who's sort of a Lego construction of a character. (With "Thumper" and the rest of his romantic interests basically Tinkertoys.) So while I'd certainly recommend the book to anyone who likes experimental fiction, I'm not ready to canonize it as the Great American Novel of the 21st century.

Rating:
Summary: House of Leaves
Review: First off, I was never scared - so on a pure horror basis, this is a "2 star." The author's style is unique (least I've not seen it before). On page 20, its entertaining. On page 145, flipping all over the place is irritating. 90% of the footnotes within footnotes (yes, within footnotes) are irrelevant. The story is good but delivered in a questionable fashion. If you have nothing better to read, okay. But with so many other good (4&5 star) books out there...

Rating:
Summary: It's ruined my week in a great way
Review: A documentary surfaces in academic circles,showing a house that, depsite the best measurements of the owner and his surveyor friend, is 1/32" wider on the inside than the outside. One day the house produces an extra hallway door, beyond which is icy dark and a hallway of constantly changing dimensions, leading to a staircase which goes down for miles, maybe thousands of miles. The owner and his friends conduct several multiday expeditions, leading to--well, you'll have to find out yourself. The film may be a hoax, it may not even exist, but it's given rise to thousands of commentaries and analyses, many of which are reproduced in the insanely voluminous footnotes.

We know about the film from the academic treatise of one Zamporo, who was recently found dead in his apartment which he had sealed, blackened, and shut off from all outside light. His immensely detailed research, myriads of footnotes (many with their own footnotes) and epigrams and commentaries in a dozen languages including Old English, were found and assembled by one Truant, who adds as much text via his own footnotes and ramblings as was in Zamporo's original work. It's Truant's book you're holding as youread; it was published shortly after Truant himself was found dead in his room, having taped and sealed the room from all outside light, and having covered the walls with yardsticks, the better to know if the walls should change by so much as a millimeter.

[There are some Old English quotes scattered about (foreign languages are usually translated, if not immediately), and the writer knows this material; the images of circling hawks and kites recurs several times; in the Old English epics hawks, circling over battlefields, both predicted and symbolized unlooked-for, inevitable death. I mention it to illustrate that this writer isn't just working at the surface level of the various fields of knowledge and endeavor that play into the book; the more you know, the more you glean from the text, though the book is an utter grabber even if you don't recognize any of the author's references.]

I won't get into the 200 pages of appendices, results of wall samples from beyond the mysterious hallway, footnotes rendered in mirror text, apparent typos which invariably resolve themselves as you keep reading, photocopies of Truant's sketches of the House (the word House is always capitalizedand printed in blue throughout the text) encrypted messages from Truant's mother in the asylum, "commentaries" by Stephen King, Camille Paglia, Ken Burns, etc.

The New York Times' (superlative) review of House of LEaves apparently took the jacket copy (describing the gradual accretion of the non-fictional source materials for the book on the Internet, and in rarified clandestine academic circles) at face value. The whole thing is by a first-time writer, Mark Danielewski.

Beyond the framing devices and other gimmickry, this thing is, psychologically and symbolically, a hundred miles deep. Just incredible.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, I couldn't put it down
Review: THis book is incredible, I have no doubt that someone is Hollywood is going to be trying to option it for the screen, how well it will translate, who knows. It's like reading two stories at once, both equally interesting, we get drawn into the main story in the book as does the narrator, the more we get drawn in, the more we want to read and the more intense the chills that race down the spine get, the more he gets drawn into it, the further he gets from reality until he loses his mind. THe book provides all sorts of insights into how some of the characters bacame who they are by providing (in one case) things like letters from the narrators mother from a period where she was institutionalized. Regardless of what the other reviewers say, there is nothing quite like this book, and I have read a lot, though I have to agree with the first reviewer, it does draw from The Shining, 2001, and the Blair Witch Project. Very good indeed. Fun to read.

Rating:
Summary: House of Cards
Review: What is all the hype about? This "first novel" is a derivative, contrived muddle that tries frantically to appear clever and original by tediously exploiting every known postmodern ruse but which at nearly every turn consistently fails to deliver, leaving the reader with the same queasy and unsatisfied feeling as if indulging in too much cheap junk food. The unoriginality and ponderousness encountered in this book are on the same scale as the rooms and passageways in the house it describes. I was bored to tears by the obviousness and clumsy moral earnestness of it all. The final subtext of this book--if you follow all the footnotes--is desperation, the result of someone trying like hell to pull the wool over your eyes for fear of revealing the only truly grim realization of this horror story: it isn't written very well. The publication hype is as shallow and faddish as the book. Save yourself 20 bucks.

Rating:
Summary: Why bother?
Review: Predictable and banal. Jumps on a dull, tired bandwagon for geeks. Don't bother, just head straight to Edgar Allen Poe - he wrote this story a century or so ago and a hundred times better than this.

Rating:
Summary: Crock Of Leaves
Review: A rather interesting little story has been buried under enough post-modern trickery to ensure high-school study halls will be abuzz for years. Danielewski goes out of his way to be very very very very very innovative and daring, and ultimately just gets rather tiresome and dull.

This has all been done before, and done better, by writers from Stephen King to Alasdair Gray to Edgar Allan Poe to Shirley Jackson to Jorge Luis Borges. I can't fault Danielewski on ambition, just on execution.

Ultimately, some cool things, but not enough to save a book that sinks under its own postmodern post-literary weight.

Rating:
Summary: What Wallace Wrought
Review: Of course, i heard about this book, and of course, i usually fall for the hype rather early, and so i decided to decide for myself.

anyway, the long and short of it is, that it is a OK horrow novel, that knowingly draws on many better stories (2001 and Blair Witch and The Shining, come to mind)

but what everyone is raving about, im not sure,

fer instance. When a character is noted to recognize medical shock in another character, he footnotes Shock and then gives a very nice definiton of it. The footnote serves no purpose except to help out dumber readers, which i suspect is who will wowed by this book,

Ie, Lit people with no foundation in science will be wowed, just as people with foundation in medical sciences were wowed by Wallaces highly detailed Medical Footes, and what not.

But if youre like me and happen to know competently Science, then what you have is writers merely adding excesss information that dosent more the story forward,

I recommend, borrowing the book for a day and sticking to the story. The footnotes are of no consequence.

as for the use of Spacing, ie, one word per page, i think what we have is a writer who is not only telling you what to think about the Novel (via footnotes) but also dictating How to read his very sentences. This is poor poor technique.

In short, Read the Story. its quite good and i liked it, but the talk of this book being the next big thing, well. Its not.

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