Rating: Summary: so postmodern it hurts Review: i was braindead for about a day after finishing this book. it's just the way it works. this book wraps its talons around you, sinks its teeth in, and never lets go. never. you become a slave to it, reading at the pace it sets for you. (you'll find out what i mean.) i read it about two years ago and i still get chills up my spine when i think about it. it's my own fault for not heeding the book's dedication/warning. (definitely one of the only books i've read that distinctly told me not to read it). yes, i speak of this book as an entity, because it is. it's about a house. the house knows that it's a house. it also knows that it's in a book. the book knows that it's a book. it also knows that it's about a house. it's also about a poor sap named Johnny who is driven mad by - you guessed it - the book. the same book you're reading. you'll identify with him - trust me. this book will frighten you. but you wont put it down.
Rating: Summary: worth the time it takes to read it Review: This is by far one of the weirdest books I have ever read, but it was worth it. I feel it ends a little suddenly, but Mark Z. Danielewski is an amazing writer the rest of the book, so I'll forgive him for that.
Rating: Summary: Ambitious... and almost brilliant! Review: It's true that all the many layers of stuff going on this book are sometimes distracting and that those distractions sometimes take away from the suspense/horror of the story. On the other hand, I have to admire Danielewski for attempting so much with his first novel and, while it may not all work out as well as he'd hoped, it's still a pretty darn impressive book. Very original, very clever.
Rating: Summary: A Good Book Spoiled Review: Thinking about reviewing this book, I'm reminded of the popular quote about golf being a good walk spoiled by a little white ball. Similarly, House of Leaves is a good book spoiled by an over-abundance of material.Like many people, I discovered this book in connection with the CD "Haunted" by the author's sister, Poe. The album is one of my personal favorites, and I thoroughly enjoyed making comparisons and seeing the similarities. However, for those who have not heard the CD, I'll start by looking at the book by itself. The main story (as you may have read a zillion times in other reviews) revolves around a film (The Navidson Record), which is a documentary of the experiences of a group of people in a wickedly unusual house. What was supposed to be a film documenting the rebirth of a relationship turns into an eerie account of very strange happenings. Where the book succeeds is in the excellently described explorations of the physically impossible hallways. The madness of the characters and the horror of the situation makes for fascintating reading. While some may be turned off by the odd writing patterns, it adds impact to an already powerful situation. The book also includes a number of very interesting diversions, including chapters that focus on the science of echoes, the history of labyrinths, and the truthfulness of photography. Also, there are some interesting appendices, including a heart-wrenching series of letters from an institutionalized mother. The letters show the increasing mental deterioration of the character, and it's almost frightening to read. Alas, as I said, the book is spoiled - if only slightly. The book is too frequently interrupted by the "founder" of the text of the film, Johnny Truant. While his story offers some interesting insights, the sexual escapades tend to come off as unnecessary and obstructive. They don't add any value to the story. Also, he tends to ramble without a sense of purpose. While his descent into madness shows the effect the story has on him, it's ultimately unneeded and unsatisfying - almost. There is a touching story near the end he tells that just about makes up for his previous material. Now, I'm rambling. Overall, I did enjoy the book a lot. I would definitely recommend it. There are a lot of great insights in the book, and it was a very interesting read. Now, for those who HAVE heard the Poe CD (and if you haven't - go listen to it), the connections are very interesting as you come across them. There are blatantly obvious ones (Like the 5 1/2 Minute Hallway and the references to Spanish Doll in the mother's letters), but some of the songs seem to take on new meaning after reading the book. I'm Not A Virgin Anymore obviously relates to the character of Navidson's wife. And Control almost doesn't seem like a lover scorned anymore. It sounds more like a woman gaining control over the House (as described in one section of the book). If you try to make the connections, it makes the read even more satisfying.
Rating: Summary: great debut Review: Quite simply, Mark Z. has a very impressive debut here, but whether it were a debut or not doesn't matter. In a time when books seem so centered on their cinematic approach and their appeal to a movie-going audience, Danielewski uses the text to enhance his story. It takes an adventurous soul to take this trip, but actually the story beneath isn't so far out that the average reader couldn't get into it. This is no Ulysses, but it is quite successful in its experimentations. The format enhances your experience, and the story leaves you wondering what the meaning behind it all is (or if all of this search for meaning is just a useless struggle).
Rating: Summary: Center everywhere, circumference nowhere Review: Ignore the four stars. I don't know how to rate this book. I finished it and put it down a week ago, and it still hasn't put me down. Unlike some of the other reviewers, I can't say I was spooked by the spooky parts, but it keeps echoing and reverberating and suggesting new ways of looking at itself. A single review can hardly scratch the surface. Ostensibly it's "about" an orphaned California slacker named Johnny Truant, who discovers a trunkful of notes in the apartment of a blind, ominously dead recluse named Zampano. The notes are for a commentary on a film documentary called The Navidson Record. The documentary records photojournalist Will Navidson's attempts to explore an expandable, collapsible, freakily infinite hallway that appears in his suburban Virginia home. Navidson's *h*o*u*s*e* (read that as blue text, please) is a heart of darkness, terrifying in its otherness, its vast inexplicability, its emptiness, its death-in-life. Truant soon discovers that the *h*o*u*s*e*, the documentary, and Navidson himself don't seem to exist in (his and the novel's) real world. But as he obsesses over the notes and the horrors they examine, he finds his own reality, or his own mind, disintegrating into ash. His breakdown leads to a nightmarish and quite likely spurious denoument, and finally to the publication by Johnny's faceless editors of the book before us. All this, including the details of Navidson's polar expeditions into inner space, reads along quite naturally, even though the book sends you hopping from text to footnote to spiralling footnotes nested several levels deep, and through typographic games that sometimes make the reader feel like he's attending a taffy pull, starring as the taffy. I often found these tricks irritating or boring, but that didn't mean I was ever capable of laying the book aside. If the prose style - actually the two prose styles, the self dramatizing, sometimes slangy and sometimes lushly lyrical, voice of Johhny Truant, and the dryly academic semiotician's voice of Zampano, with its dryly sardonic footnotes mocking every convention of "critical theory" - is nothing to write home about, it's always appropriate to the character delivering it. The massive display of erudition (Danielewski has not merely read Heidegger and Derrida, he has them thoroughly scoped out, and builds their ideas deeply into the warp and woof of his novel) is bound to strike some readers as dreary showing off. But he doesn't just drop names. He makes use of them: he makes his Latin tags and mythological allusions and postmodern cliches bounce off one another, enlarging alarmingly the mental space inhabited by the text. There must be a hundred different ways to think about Danielewski's artifact, a hundred paths into the labyrinth, and at every turning he generously sets up signposts to help willing readers get lost among them. To follow one main clew: "*H*o*u*s*e* of Leaves" is a book about text, and how text and reality construct one another. The climax of each of the two main stories (and it just may take many readings to figure out how many other stories are camouflaged within them) involves an act of book burning. At the very center of Navidson's life is a still photo, one which won him a Pulitzer Prize - and though Navidson is fictional, the photo and its Pulitzer are real. At the center of Truant's obsessions is a mental movie of the moment a labyrinth of scars was traced across his chest and arms, making a text of his body. So notes of anonymous "editors" wrap around Truant's notes, which wrap around Zampano's notes, which wrap around Zampano's text, which wraps around Navidson's documentary, which wraps around a devastating photograph that really exists in the real reader's world - which wraps around the book. Where in the world or out of it is the center of this elaborate onion? At one point in the documentary, Navidson speculates that the *h*o*u*s*e* is God. Danielewski isn't explicit, but that offhand remark is probably meant to call to mind the classic image of God in American literature, the fearful blankness, the whiteness, of Ahab's whale. Nicolas of Cusa once defined God as "a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." In this volume, Danielewski has attempted to construct a circularly layered piece of literature which meets those specifications. And I can't swear that he hasn't succeeded. Once you've followed the twists and turns of all the unheimlich maneuvers in "*H*o*u*s*e* of Leaves", where will you come out? Probably not where I did. As a work of literature, it may be worth anything from two stars to six. But as a work of echoing acoustic architecture, I'd have to say it's without parallel.
Rating: Summary: THIS IS NOT FOR YOU Review: Mark Danielewski's HOUSE OF LEAVES is, without a doubt, a singularly odd & purely Post Modernist literary construction; its narrative framed several times over in the most disconcerting manner, its matter of subject demented. Satirizing - among many other targets - academia, the literary canon, pop culture & even ITSELF at times, HOUSE OF LEAVES is a genre defiant work of genius which refuses to be categorized. I can't understand what audience it could have been crafted for - I searched all over for Oprah's label but couldn't find it - & can only assume that it was written with no specific audience in mind at all. How could there have been? There's no central story, no true protagonist in any definitive sense of the word, & no happy ending. The character of Zampano is dead when we meet him, Johnny is on his way, and Navidson, though not dead, comes out of the thing more mangled than even Bronte's Rochester at the end of JANE EYRE. No, the larger lessons of HOUSE OF LEAVES lie in the fact that its story, or rather, stories - are accessible to all, even if we can't exactly relate to all the technicalities involved. Even the densest reader cannot help but be drawn along for the ride, & acutely feel each & every one of the dips & turns the narrators of the novel feel. Much ado is made over the shapes of different poems & how clever their creators are. George Bernard Shaw spaces out a few words in HEARTBREAK HOUSE for emphasis & the world goes mad. Danielewski arranges his words to tease, frustrate - to communicate the experiences his characters are experiencing. To take us out of the theater & make us active participators in the act. Under Daniewlewski's masterful manipulation, as I read, I sunk ever more into his text, falling when he wanted me to, my eyes narrowing in on passages as ordered to or skittering nervously across the page looking for a word that wasn't where it was supposed to be. I generally clip through novels at a very fast rate, yet the way the text was arranged kept me from flying through the story. Instead, I was forced to go as fast or slow as Danielewski wished, often having to twist the book or myself to get to the next word, nearly doubling myself over as I flipped through pages with one word on them, sometimes even further contorting myself to read things printed upside down or backwards. There came a time when, save for page numbers, I wasn't sure whether I held the book upside or down! Before this novel, I never thought there would BE a time when I would have to wonder. Words printed in claustrophobic little boxes had me breathing shallowly & then sighing in relief when the box widened out. Though only the word 'house' was blue, I began seeing traces of the color throughout the text, on other words, & I'd stare at them a few seconds, blink, & then wait until they readjusted to their proper black & white. HOUSE OF LEAVES is a powerful work which effects you while you're reading it, but more importantly, its lessons & piquancy stay with you even after you've turned the last page. A must read which begs inclusion in every library.
Rating: Summary: Completely unforgettable Review: Well, I'm not sure if House of Leaves terrified me as much as it did other reviewers, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'll spare another repetitive synopsis of the book, and instead tell possible readers how enjoyable the book is beyond plot and background info. At many times during the book, you'll find yourself completely forgetting about the supernatural developments in the house while reading a tangent Johnny had provided. Along the same lines, fear and suspense are also interrupted from time to time with Danielewski's sporadic comedic moments (his sense of humor and use of irony is unmatched). Personally, I discovered the book because of its relation to Poe's "Haunted" disc, and when I saw all of the insane page structures, I was hooked. A silly enough reason to buy a book, but I had a feeling about it...and I was right. If nothing else, satisfy your curiosity by picking it up in a local store and see what you're missing - you won't regret it.
Rating: Summary: For the sake of clarity Review: Timeless. I hate the indulgence of postmodernity. I say there is something more than meets your eye here. Look carfully; and no, I'm not a slacker. And I dislike cofeeshops. This is the nexus of our own twisted agenda. It is a mirror. Look at the love we give George Bush; war; lies and perception: our selfless cap.i.tal.is.tic charity. All this and more. Much, much more. A mirror; the eye
Rating: Summary: The wonderfully creepy HOUSE OF LEAVES Review: Anyone who doubts that a critical book about a movie, which incidenatlly doesn't even exist, is worthy of your reading time needs to read HOUSE OF LEAVES. From the introduction, the reader will be hooked. It is tremedously creepy and could possibly make the unprepared quite afraid of the dark.
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