(no subject)
Read a lot of House of Leaves at work. Amaaaaaaazing book.... there are some pretty "adult" moments that keep popping up but I guess that's part of the depraved and lost theme? All of that is in the narrator's footnotes, though. And with the ridiculous life the narrator had, it's no wonder he ended up like he is. I'm just getting to the part of the book where the pages are like a maze and the people are officially lost in the house and Holloway is going a bit crazy. I love the fact that the footnotes become incredibly hard to follow and they advise you to look at other pages/parts of the book and some of the footnotes are just long lists of meaningless items. Not to mention that the text is sometimes backwards, sideways, upside down, or scattered across the pages. You get lost in the book at the same time the characters are lost. The writer in me says it must have taken years upon years to craft something like this. I've seen play like this in books before, especially in A Series of Unfortunate Events (there is 1 gimick per book - for example, in the Ersatz Elevator, they fall into the dark shaft, you turn the page, and the page is a big black rectangle), but nothing on this scale of weirdness. I would love to write something as inventive but I feel like it would just be stealing this idea.... and if you're going to reproduce something you should do it at least as well as the original or it feels fake. That's why I don't like cover songs most of the time, unless they do something totally different with the same thing, or they do the same thing a lot better than it already was. You might as well just listen to the original song otherwise. And personally, I don't think I could ever outdo House of Leaves.
I got to thinking about how House of Leaves kind of resembles Coraline (maybe I should say Coraline resembles House of Leaves)..... Of course, Coraline is a kid's book, and I think Coraline is mostly a dark version of Alice in Wonderland (how else do you explain that the only character going in and out of that world easily was a cat?). I don't really know where I'm going with this I guess. I was thinking about the whole "character goes into another world" storyline and how this and Coraline resemble that but at the same time are quite different. Coraline enters a mirror world where everything strongly resembles her own but in a twisted way. Coraline and House of Leaves both involve opening a mysterious door in your own house and finding a dark hallway there, where it is physically impossible for a hallway to exist. The thing about the dark hallway and rooms in House of Leaves is that they are empty and totally lifeless. It's not even another world at all..... it's like nothingness. Just an endless dark maze of rooms. The other books that remind me of this are the Glassblower's Children (kids get stolen away from their world and adopted into a dark palace) and some William Sleator book I read about a girl that makes the dolls in her dollhouse fight and one day wakes up a member of her own doll family having to deal with the messy family she created. They are all dark stories involving people entering a place that leaves them permanently changed.
I've been thinking about whether or not there actually is a minotaur in the maze. If there is, it's quite possible the maze was made to keep it from getting outside. If there isn't, it makes me question why the rooms exist in the first place. But I think that in the end it doesn't matter whether or not there is a monster. Even if there is nothing in those rooms.... just the thought that there might be something is enough to make someone uneasy. It makes Holloway mad enough to run off hunting it.... just being lost in a dark place like that is enough to bring out the best or the worst in someone. Maybe the place itself is the monster. Maybe it enjoys rearranging its rooms to confuse people and keep them inside it. Maybe the growling noises that everyone hears are coming from the house itself.
One unanswered question - who made the house?
Few books provoke me to think like this.
It amused me thinking about all the footnotes in this book because I got to thinking about my livejournal tags and they're basically the same thing. You click on them and suddenly you're lost in a maze of my livejournal. How will you ever escape? D:
EDIT: http://moldypotatochip.livejournal.com/252688.html
I got to thinking about how House of Leaves kind of resembles Coraline (maybe I should say Coraline resembles House of Leaves)..... Of course, Coraline is a kid's book, and I think Coraline is mostly a dark version of Alice in Wonderland (how else do you explain that the only character going in and out of that world easily was a cat?). I don't really know where I'm going with this I guess. I was thinking about the whole "character goes into another world" storyline and how this and Coraline resemble that but at the same time are quite different. Coraline enters a mirror world where everything strongly resembles her own but in a twisted way. Coraline and House of Leaves both involve opening a mysterious door in your own house and finding a dark hallway there, where it is physically impossible for a hallway to exist. The thing about the dark hallway and rooms in House of Leaves is that they are empty and totally lifeless. It's not even another world at all..... it's like nothingness. Just an endless dark maze of rooms. The other books that remind me of this are the Glassblower's Children (kids get stolen away from their world and adopted into a dark palace) and some William Sleator book I read about a girl that makes the dolls in her dollhouse fight and one day wakes up a member of her own doll family having to deal with the messy family she created. They are all dark stories involving people entering a place that leaves them permanently changed.
I've been thinking about whether or not there actually is a minotaur in the maze. If there is, it's quite possible the maze was made to keep it from getting outside. If there isn't, it makes me question why the rooms exist in the first place. But I think that in the end it doesn't matter whether or not there is a monster. Even if there is nothing in those rooms.... just the thought that there might be something is enough to make someone uneasy. It makes Holloway mad enough to run off hunting it.... just being lost in a dark place like that is enough to bring out the best or the worst in someone. Maybe the place itself is the monster. Maybe it enjoys rearranging its rooms to confuse people and keep them inside it. Maybe the growling noises that everyone hears are coming from the house itself.
One unanswered question - who made the house?
Few books provoke me to think like this.
It amused me thinking about all the footnotes in this book because I got to thinking about my livejournal tags and they're basically the same thing. You click on them and suddenly you're lost in a maze of my livejournal. How will you ever escape? D:
EDIT: http://moldypotatochip.livejournal.com/252688.html