| House of Leaves | 
 enlarge | Author: Mark Z. Danielewski
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  583 reviews
Sales Rank: 1465
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2nd
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 709
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7 x 1.2
ISBN: 0375703764
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375703768
ASIN: 0375703764
Publication Date: March 7, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves. Mark Z. Danielewski's first novel has a lot going on: notably the discovery of a pseudoacademic monograph called The Navidson Record, written by a blind man named Zampano, about a nonexistent documentary film--which itself is about a photojournalist who finds a house that has supernatural, surreal qualities. (The inner dimensions, for example, are measurably larger than the outer ones.) In addition to this Russian-doll layering of narrators, Danielewski packs in poems, scientific lists, collages, Polaroids, appendices of fake correspondence and "various quotes," single lines of prose placed any which way on the page, crossed-out passages, and so on. Now that we've reached the post-postmodern era, presumably there's nobody left who needs liberating from the strictures of conventional fiction. So apart from its narrative high jinks, what does House of Leaves have to offer? According to Johnny Truant, the tattoo-shop apprentice who discovers Zampano's work, once you read The Navidson Record, For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. We'll have to take his word for it, however. As it's presented here, the description of the spooky film isn't continuous enough to have much scare power. Instead, we're pulled back into Johnny Truant's world through his footnotes, which he uses to discharge everything in his head, including the discovery of the manuscript, his encounters with people who knew Zampano, and his own battles with drugs, sex, ennui, and a vague evil force. If The Navidson Record is a mad professor lecturing on the supernatural with rational-seeming conviction, Truant's footnotes are the manic student in the back of the auditorium, wigged out and furiously scribbling whoa-dude notes about life. Despite his flaws, Truant is an appealingly earnest amateur editor--finding translators, tracking down sources, pointing out incongruities. Danielewski takes an academic's--or ex-academic's--glee in footnotes (the similarity to David Foster Wallace is almost too obvious to mention), as well as other bogus ivory-tower trappings such as interviews with celebrity scholars like Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom. And he stuffs highbrow and pop-culture references (and parodies) into the novel with the enthusiasm of an anarchist filling a pipe bomb with bits of junk metal. House of Leaves may not be the prettiest or most coherent collection, but if you're trying to blow stuff up, who cares? --John Ponyicsanyi
Product Description
This book, Mark Z. Danielewski's experimental first novel, has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, which aims to recogise and reward new writing across fiction and non-fiction. A special report featuring reviews, extracts and online resources for all the titles, plus talkboards and an online poll can be found[online].
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| Customer Reviews: Read 578 more reviews...
 Trippy December 1, 2008
A trippy mindscrew of a book that will have you hooked for days for the first, second, and third reads through. A fitting labyrinth that makes full use of the media provided.
 Complex and Unique, But Very Hard to Read November 11, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Mark Z. Danielewski, the author, does some very complex and interesting things.
Much of his book is supposed to be a mock-academic treatise written by a strange, blind man. The academic text is heavily footnoted, and while some of the footnotes are by the blind man, Danielewski suggests that others were written by a mentally-unstable man, a tattoo-shop employee who found the academic treatise after its blind author died. Many of these footnotes go on for many pages, are written in a wild, sometimes incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness style, and are meant to detail the tattoo-employee's descent into madness as he becomes increasingly obsessed with the blind man's academic treatise.
Are you following this so far? It's a pretty complex book. But its authors' oddities don't stop there!
At several points in the book, the footnotes go wild, involving incredibly long lists of names, appearing in all sorts of places on the page, and sometimes even appearing as mirror images. At several other points in the book, only a few lines of text appear per page. In other parts, text runs diagonally down the page, rather than left to right, or text appears in a clump, or words take up most of a line, etc. etc. etc.
I don't feel like I'm giving too much away, here. You'd notice this much if you just quickly paged through the book.
And, amazingly, all of these wild visual variations make complete sense, and coincide very well with the stories being told in the mock-academic treatise. Sometimes the text's appearance gives the impression of a labyrinth, sometimes it gives the impression of climbing, and so on.
Notice, so far, I haven't even given any real idea of the book's story or plot! The book might be considered a horror; after all, the academic treatise is (roughly speaking) about a scary house that holds a tremendous labyrinth. Or it might be considered a love story; it's about the relationships described by the academic treatise and the tattoo-employee. Overall, it's a very complex book. If I said much more, I'd be at risk of giving up too much of its game.
So why, if the book is so interesting, did I only give it a three star ranking? It was incredibly difficult to read! The blind man's academic treatise reads, at times, like a ridiculous but very dry treatise, filled with meaningless citations and fake quotations from scholars. The tattoo-employee's footnotes are crazy. Written in a stream-of-consciousness style, they sometimes seem poorly written, and often go off on nearly incomprehensible jags. Further, in this book, you can't always read the text from left to right, as is typical. Sometimes you have to read up or down the page. And that takes effort.
In general, all of the author's stylistic, visual, and content-driven oddities were rather distracting. It took me months to finish, and I rarely read more than ten or twenty pages at a time. It was too much effort for a book I was hoping would be fun.
Still, I give it credit. The author does do some very complex and interesting things.
If nothing else, provides material for good discussions October 30, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
A book about a book written by an old man about a movie that never was, compiled by a young man with a psychotic mother and a broken life. It's a rich universe contained in a single volume, and it is amazing as long as you forget that none of it is real.
Doubtlessly, people will be drawn to one or both of the substories within. People who compared it to the Blaire-Witch focuses on the fictitious movie, The Navidson Project. Others enjoy how life mirrors art, as Johnny Truant's life is reflected in the House, which in turn reflects those that live within.
To me, the most important question a lover of literature can ask of this book is : where does its merit come from?
To me, respectable works contribute in one of two ways, they either elevate the beauty of the language, or they synthesize what comes before them. For instance, Lolita by Nabokov has been described as the author's love affair with English. A ground breaking thesis by Hawking or Newton synthesize the theories and observations of those in the past. Shakespeare was in a unique position to do both. Many of his most famous plays were rewrites of past works - he just happened to be the most eloquent person to write it then, and ever since.
Experimental fiction like the House of Leaves are experimental because they do not fall neatly into either camp. This comes from a dominant theme in the genre of breaking the boundary between reader and book. The relationship of Johnny with The Navidson Project is analogous to us readers as we go through this book. We are drawn in, all the while fascinated by the absurdity of believing so much in the reality of the fiction. In a way, it's a statement of our perception of reality itself - break it down far enough and we only find bits of our dreams and imaginations. Conversely, when fiction piless upon itself exponentially, reality is born.
An engaging and clever read October 27, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I bought this book after reading the xkcd comic (http://xkcd.com/472/) and was very glad I did. I'm not going into a plot summary, if you want one you can check out wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves). Instead, I'm going to briefly discuss the style of the book and address the complaints I've read in other reviews.
I'm not sure how someone can find the plot of The Navidson Record boring. Yes, it's true that there are essentially academic papers scattered throughout the text, sometimes up to a chapter long. First of all I think that these texts, no matter how boring some may find them, are an important part of the story--they are Zampano's writings and add to the depth of his character. And while they are not essential to the text, I found them interesting to read, and it gave me something to think about, some lens with which to view the story once the book returned to the central plot. The author (although I can't remember whether it was Johnny Truant or Zampano, let's just say Danielewski) even comments that you are allowed to skip parts of the text if you so desire. If you don't want to read a 20+ page paper on "echo", then skip it, or skim through it.
Another comment was that the requisite book-rotating detracted from the experience. I loved all the sections that were like this, and felt they added to the experience. Without giving away the plot, you become disoriented as one of the character does, even forgetting which way to turn the pages as the character struggles to find his way through the house. There is a level of reader-participation required, but if you do pay attention to the intricate formatting it will connect you closer to the characters in the book and how they feel.
Finally, on the subject of the footnotes. Yes, a lot of them are unnecessary, and I could see how it would be distracting to read a multi-page footnote and then try to return to the story. So don't!!! Continue with the text and at the end of the chapter come back to one of Johnny Truant's stories. I don't see why this is so difficult for some people.
In summation this is a great book, and if you put some effort into it you may start to wonder if perhaps the things Johnny Truant undergoes are happening to you. And if you're paying attention, you'll certainly get a kick out of a few of the more clever moments (some of my favorites were pages 168, 192, most of chapter 15, 467).
:/ October 23, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
It was odd..... very odd....
Couldnt stand the footnotes by that johnny guy though
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