...nothing to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience.
HOUSE OF LEAVES
Mark Z. Danielewski
A book about a book about a film about a house. Each layer its own story, its own distinct narrative voice, its own quest for meaning and the physical and psychological tolls of that quest. At its core is the story of Johnny Truant who comes across a manuscript left behind by a blind man. The manuscript is the story of a young couple and the impossible house they have moved their family into. The house, they discover, is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. This perplexing discovery pushes them towards a psychologically horrific odyssey through a constantly changing labyrinth the house turns out to be, as well as a startlingly precise mirror for their own fragile psyches.
At the same time as we chronicle the family's travails, we track the Johnny's psychological disintegration (encapsulated like a Matryoshka doll in the heartbreaking appendixed interlude concerning his institutionalized mother) as he attempts to put together Zampano's (sometimes overly) erudite and complicated analysis of what exactly happened to the Navidson family after they moved into that strange house on Ash Tree Lane. On top of that is another mostly silent narrator putting together Johnny's notes and correcting his own faults, thereby revealing himself. But he serves only to highlight Johnny's occasional brilliance and his increasingly unstable mental condition.
This was one of the most difficult books I've read ever, but ultimately one of the most rewarding. Difficult because of its many stylistic excesses and its almost impenetrable beginning (I say impenetrable because Johnny's far from likable and the set-up takes entirely too long). Rewarding because the sheer enormity of the book's intertextuality made for such a stimulating read. There were times, skipping back and forth between the story, the footnotes, and the appendices, that I must've looked crazy to the other commuters, but it was all an effort to track down a reference that dinged a remembrance in my mind of another comment uttered by a character, which then sent me to the appendix and back again, and all the while, I was consumed by this feverish, euphoric rush. Meaning sprouted from the most unlikely of places, and Danielewski pulls off some impressive ventriloquism here.
But the book is broken really, really hard, and that's part of where the difficulty for me came from. Johnny's voice seems to me the only one that doesn't strike pitch-perfection. And a lot of his excesses (sentences, clauses that go on for half a page at a time) become tedious and more trouble than their worth. Similarly, a few of the moments where the text attempts to reflect the physical situation of the characters (yes, this is a recurring theme), I encountered some of the less successful mises en abyme that occur throughout the story.
It's equal parts haunted-house horror, caustic and rueful satire of academia, intense character study and love story. And, in this case, I can forgive its many excesses and occasional impenetrability for the amount of sheer heart pouring this thing. I haven't read anything this complicated, or this gleeful in its complication, in a long time.
Mark Z. Danielewski
A book about a book about a film about a house. Each layer its own story, its own distinct narrative voice, its own quest for meaning and the physical and psychological tolls of that quest. At its core is the story of Johnny Truant who comes across a manuscript left behind by a blind man. The manuscript is the story of a young couple and the impossible house they have moved their family into. The house, they discover, is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. This perplexing discovery pushes them towards a psychologically horrific odyssey through a constantly changing labyrinth the house turns out to be, as well as a startlingly precise mirror for their own fragile psyches.
At the same time as we chronicle the family's travails, we track the Johnny's psychological disintegration (encapsulated like a Matryoshka doll in the heartbreaking appendixed interlude concerning his institutionalized mother) as he attempts to put together Zampano's (sometimes overly) erudite and complicated analysis of what exactly happened to the Navidson family after they moved into that strange house on Ash Tree Lane. On top of that is another mostly silent narrator putting together Johnny's notes and correcting his own faults, thereby revealing himself. But he serves only to highlight Johnny's occasional brilliance and his increasingly unstable mental condition.
This was one of the most difficult books I've read ever, but ultimately one of the most rewarding. Difficult because of its many stylistic excesses and its almost impenetrable beginning (I say impenetrable because Johnny's far from likable and the set-up takes entirely too long). Rewarding because the sheer enormity of the book's intertextuality made for such a stimulating read. There were times, skipping back and forth between the story, the footnotes, and the appendices, that I must've looked crazy to the other commuters, but it was all an effort to track down a reference that dinged a remembrance in my mind of another comment uttered by a character, which then sent me to the appendix and back again, and all the while, I was consumed by this feverish, euphoric rush. Meaning sprouted from the most unlikely of places, and Danielewski pulls off some impressive ventriloquism here.
But the book is broken really, really hard, and that's part of where the difficulty for me came from. Johnny's voice seems to me the only one that doesn't strike pitch-perfection. And a lot of his excesses (sentences, clauses that go on for half a page at a time) become tedious and more trouble than their worth. Similarly, a few of the moments where the text attempts to reflect the physical situation of the characters (yes, this is a recurring theme), I encountered some of the less successful mises en abyme that occur throughout the story.
It's equal parts haunted-house horror, caustic and rueful satire of academia, intense character study and love story. And, in this case, I can forgive its many excesses and occasional impenetrability for the amount of sheer heart pouring this thing. I haven't read anything this complicated, or this gleeful in its complication, in a long time.