Effin' Great Books: House of Leaves
<color=blue>House<color=black> of Leaves
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/de/House_of_leaves.jpg
By Mark Z. Danielewski
Genre: Experimental Literature, HorrorThis is not for you.
Plot Synopsis
<color=blue>House of Leaves is a very complex book. It's hard to figure out where to start, so I'll start where the book starts.A tangible
impossibility.
A living
paradox<color=blue>House of Leaves starts with a letter to the reader from Johnny Truant - tattoo artist, loner - living emaciated and paranoid in a cheap apartment. He writes us how the events that destroyed his mind and life started, with him and his friend finding a dead body. The body is that of a man known as Zámpano - old, blind, obsessed with writing - and he is found lifeless among the remains of his destroyed apartment, although he himself, oddly enough, appears to have died of natural causes. Windows painted black and boarded up, measuring tapes glued all over the floor, half the furniture now destroyed, and among this madness and destruction, the very thing that took so firm a grip of poor Johnny's mind, a black trunk.
The trunk is filled to the brim with writing. Paper, scraps, napkins. As Johnny eventually realizes, it is a manuscript. The manuscript for a book called The Navidson Record, which Johnny discovers, as he pieces it together, is a complex and in-depth analysis of a film of the same name, that Johnny claims isn't actually a real film. This film started out as a home project of Will Navidson - photojournalist, decorated war photographer - to document his family settling in their newly bought <color=blue>house. Things are going well, until something unthinkable happens. By chance, Navidson discovers something unimaginable. A tangible impossibility. A living paradox.
The <color=blue>house is three inches bigger on the inside than on the outside.
<img width=300>http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-M7bAqJaotto/Tcf3OHgUMfI/AAAAAAAAABE/ICoW2lUDBXg/s1600/house_of_leaves.jpg
The black square represents existential horror, or something.There are several layers, several threads, if you will, to this remarkable book. The bulk of the text is Zámpano's The Navidson Record, in which we witness the plight of Navidson and his wife as their relationship and even their very lives are threatened by the menacing <color=blue>house, which reveals itself to contain an unimaginably vast, ever changing labyrinth. This text is supplied with annotations and notes by Johnny Truant who is trying to make sense of it all, trying to decide what is real and what isn't as the cosmic fears and impossibilities threaten to enter his own life. Then there are some unrelated notes and poems by Zámpano which may contain clues concerning the reality and origins of the extraordinary events happening to the Navidson family.
But only half of <color=blue>House of Leaves is about the story. The other half is about how the story is told. You see, <color=blue>House of Leaves, and especially The Navidson Record has a slightly bizarre layout. The layout echoes the events of the story. For instance, when they discover that the <color=blue>house contains a labyrinth and explore it, the book becomes a labyrinth. You'll be reading upside down, searching the pages for footnotes, disregard seemingly meaningless black squares and endless ranting annotations - dead ends, if you will - and generally have a hard time orientating yourself. And the book does this with any remarkable situation it feels you should experience as well.
Except that everything I just told you was false.Or was it? <color=blue>House of Leaves is a book of questions. If you have been paying attention earlier you'll have noticed that certain things don't add up; Zámpano's apartement was smashed and there was a long claw mark on the floor, yet he himself had died of natural causes. Why are his windows painted black? And most distressing of all, perhaps, why would a blind man write an analysis of a film?
Not only do we have an unreliable narrator - multiple, in fact - we also have an unreliable writer, and even an unreliable reader. <color=blue>House of Leaves and its intricate stories summon many, many questions, which all lead to one bigger question: what is going on? Which is to say: what is true? The book provides many, many answers, most of which - if not all - are absolutely false and contradictory. But it still provides them, it leads you on, lets you believe that there truly is an answer, keeps you going through all the madness, horror, and paradoxes it provides, makes you read it again and again, until you're as obsessed as poor Johnny Truant.
In the end, <color=blue>House of Leaves is only part story. The other part is an experience, a feeling. The feeling of being lost and afraid. Alone in a dark labyrinth.
The experience of being in the <color=blue>House of Leaves.
<color=blue>House<color=black> of Leaves
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/de/House_of_leaves.jpg
By Mark Z. Danielewski
Genre: Experimental Literature, HorrorThis is not for you.
Plot Synopsis
<color=blue>House of Leaves is a very complex book. It's hard to figure out where to start, so I'll start where the book starts.A tangible
impossibility.
A living
paradox<color=blue>House of Leaves starts with a letter to the reader from Johnny Truant - tattoo artist, loner - living emaciated and paranoid in a cheap apartment. He writes us how the events that destroyed his mind and life started, with him and his friend finding a dead body. The body is that of a man known as Zámpano - old, blind, obsessed with writing - and he is found lifeless among the remains of his destroyed apartment, although he himself, oddly enough, appears to have died of natural causes. Windows painted black and boarded up, measuring tapes glued all over the floor, half the furniture now destroyed, and among this madness and destruction, the very thing that took so firm a grip of poor Johnny's mind, a black trunk.
The trunk is filled to the brim with writing. Paper, scraps, napkins. As Johnny eventually realizes, it is a manuscript. The manuscript for a book called The Navidson Record, which Johnny discovers, as he pieces it together, is a complex and in-depth analysis of a film of the same name, that Johnny claims isn't actually a real film. This film started out as a home project of Will Navidson - photojournalist, decorated war photographer - to document his family settling in their newly bought <color=blue>house. Things are going well, until something unthinkable happens. By chance, Navidson discovers something unimaginable. A tangible impossibility. A living paradox.
The <color=blue>house is three inches bigger on the inside than on the outside.
<img width=300>http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-M7bAqJaotto/Tcf3OHgUMfI/AAAAAAAAABE/ICoW2lUDBXg/s1600/house_of_leaves.jpg
The black square represents existential horror, or something.There are several layers, several threads, if you will, to this remarkable book. The bulk of the text is Zámpano's The Navidson Record, in which we witness the plight of Navidson and his wife as their relationship and even their very lives are threatened by the menacing <color=blue>house, which reveals itself to contain an unimaginably vast, ever changing labyrinth. This text is supplied with annotations and notes by Johnny Truant who is trying to make sense of it all, trying to decide what is real and what isn't as the cosmic fears and impossibilities threaten to enter his own life. Then there are some unrelated notes and poems by Zámpano which may contain clues concerning the reality and origins of the extraordinary events happening to the Navidson family.
But only half of <color=blue>House of Leaves is about the story. The other half is about how the story is told. You see, <color=blue>House of Leaves, and especially The Navidson Record has a slightly bizarre layout. The layout echoes the events of the story. For instance, when they discover that the <color=blue>house contains a labyrinth and explore it, the book becomes a labyrinth. You'll be reading upside down, searching the pages for footnotes, disregard seemingly meaningless black squares and endless ranting annotations - dead ends, if you will - and generally have a hard time orientating yourself. And the book does this with any remarkable situation it feels you should experience as well.
Except that everything I just told you was false.Or was it? <color=blue>House of Leaves is a book of questions. If you have been paying attention earlier you'll have noticed that certain things don't add up; Zámpano's apartement was smashed and there was a long claw mark on the floor, yet he himself had died of natural causes. Why are his windows painted black? And most distressing of all, perhaps, why would a blind man write an analysis of a film?
Not only do we have an unreliable narrator - multiple, in fact - we also have an unreliable writer, and even an unreliable reader. <color=blue>House of Leaves and its intricate stories summon many, many questions, which all lead to one bigger question: what is going on? Which is to say: what is true? The book provides many, many answers, most of which - if not all - are absolutely false and contradictory. But it still provides them, it leads you on, lets you believe that there truly is an answer, keeps you going through all the madness, horror, and paradoxes it provides, makes you read it again and again, until you're as obsessed as poor Johnny Truant.
In the end, <color=blue>House of Leaves is only part story. The other part is an experience, a feeling. The feeling of being lost and afraid. Alone in a dark labyrinth.
The experience of being in the <color=blue>House of Leaves.
) very cool and open to debates and the such.
