House of Leaves by Danielewski
House of Leaves (2000)
by Mark Z. Danielewski
709 pages - Pantheon Books
I can't quite remember why I bought this book about four years ago, but I did. It looks very interesting physically, being very large and 700 pages thick, and when you flip through it it grabs your attention, with a lot of interesting stuff done with typography and different fonts. It consists of a document written by an old blind man, a sort of academic criticism of a film that apparently doesn't exist, a documentary about a family that moves into a house and suddenly finds new corridors appearing that go off seemingly into infinity. This whole document is framed by the words of Johnny Truant, a substance-abusing apprentice at a tattoo shop living in Los Angeles, who discovered the document and keeps interposing himself through footnotes.
The book was quite captivating for the first 100 pages or so, and I was really enjoying it as a sort of metaphor about all things that are bigger on the inside as compared to the outside: books, people, etc. But the author gets more and more self-indulgent and pretty soon you are reading very dry criticism of fictional material, and reading through page after page of lists of names or construction materials or whatever the author probably did an internet search on that day. I would say the three all-time dullest things to read are verbal descriptions of cinematography, academic criticism, and endless footnotes (which often are footnoted themselves) - and this book is basically full of all three. Luckily it's not really 700 pages long, as there are several hundred-page sections that you can flip through in about five minutes, as they mostly just contain a sentence or two and the only thing slowing you down is having to constantly turn the book to read the material that's upside-down or sideways. Which all sounds a lot more cool and fun than it really is.
It's too bad, because I thought that there was some real potential in several parts of the story, whether it be the spooky house with corridors that appear, or Johnny Truant's obviously made-up accounts of his increasingly wild sex and drug benders with women straight out of a wet dream; but none of these things were followed up on or developed. For the first little bit I could kind of suspend my disbelief at the way the family (seemingly quite well off financially too) just kept living in the house with their kids as crazy stuff happened, because I reasoned out that it was more metaphorical. But after a while the characters stop being real at all and end up just being plot devices. And I don't know what kind of person would see their already creepy house filled with several bloody, mutilated, dead and dying bodies, and then a few months later just move back in and decide that it's kind of a fixer-upper. One of the appendixes at the end has letters from Truant's mother who is in a mental institution, and though they're supposedly from an American in the 1980s, to show off Danielewski has her sound like some sort of Oxford professor in the 19th century. Bad characterization, bad writing - this whole book was just a bad idea.
A question I've found myself asking a lot lately, about things like books and movies, but regarding other stuff too, is, "What is the purpose of this thing's existence?" Is there anything here that needs to be said, any value or admirable quality? Books like this get labelled as 'pretentious' but I'm not sure that's the right word. Maybe 'conceited' or 'presumptuous'.
By the way, the author is actually the brother of the musician who goes by the name of Poe, and her second album Haunted supposedly has some ties to this book.
by Mark Z. Danielewski
709 pages - Pantheon Books
I can't quite remember why I bought this book about four years ago, but I did. It looks very interesting physically, being very large and 700 pages thick, and when you flip through it it grabs your attention, with a lot of interesting stuff done with typography and different fonts. It consists of a document written by an old blind man, a sort of academic criticism of a film that apparently doesn't exist, a documentary about a family that moves into a house and suddenly finds new corridors appearing that go off seemingly into infinity. This whole document is framed by the words of Johnny Truant, a substance-abusing apprentice at a tattoo shop living in Los Angeles, who discovered the document and keeps interposing himself through footnotes.
The book was quite captivating for the first 100 pages or so, and I was really enjoying it as a sort of metaphor about all things that are bigger on the inside as compared to the outside: books, people, etc. But the author gets more and more self-indulgent and pretty soon you are reading very dry criticism of fictional material, and reading through page after page of lists of names or construction materials or whatever the author probably did an internet search on that day. I would say the three all-time dullest things to read are verbal descriptions of cinematography, academic criticism, and endless footnotes (which often are footnoted themselves) - and this book is basically full of all three. Luckily it's not really 700 pages long, as there are several hundred-page sections that you can flip through in about five minutes, as they mostly just contain a sentence or two and the only thing slowing you down is having to constantly turn the book to read the material that's upside-down or sideways. Which all sounds a lot more cool and fun than it really is.
It's too bad, because I thought that there was some real potential in several parts of the story, whether it be the spooky house with corridors that appear, or Johnny Truant's obviously made-up accounts of his increasingly wild sex and drug benders with women straight out of a wet dream; but none of these things were followed up on or developed. For the first little bit I could kind of suspend my disbelief at the way the family (seemingly quite well off financially too) just kept living in the house with their kids as crazy stuff happened, because I reasoned out that it was more metaphorical. But after a while the characters stop being real at all and end up just being plot devices. And I don't know what kind of person would see their already creepy house filled with several bloody, mutilated, dead and dying bodies, and then a few months later just move back in and decide that it's kind of a fixer-upper. One of the appendixes at the end has letters from Truant's mother who is in a mental institution, and though they're supposedly from an American in the 1980s, to show off Danielewski has her sound like some sort of Oxford professor in the 19th century. Bad characterization, bad writing - this whole book was just a bad idea.
A question I've found myself asking a lot lately, about things like books and movies, but regarding other stuff too, is, "What is the purpose of this thing's existence?" Is there anything here that needs to be said, any value or admirable quality? Books like this get labelled as 'pretentious' but I'm not sure that's the right word. Maybe 'conceited' or 'presumptuous'.
By the way, the author is actually the brother of the musician who goes by the name of Poe, and her second album Haunted supposedly has some ties to this book.