House of leaves

To try to explain what is ‘actually happening’ in this novel you would have to give away the most humongous of spoilers. But I can say that it is the following:

-the story of a dysfunctional family who move into a house which is somehow larger on the inside than the outside, and the exploration of the spaces that the house opens up
-the story of a young man with a troubled personal life, who discovers a manuscript telling the above story and investigates its origins
semi-blank pages. Typographic strangeness. A scrapbook of discarded images, year after year
-footnotes and endnotes that sometimes go on for most of the page

it has been compared with David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest but that is mostly about the footnotes. Well, and the mysterious film that everyone is talking about but nobody seems to have seen. And something about someone sticking their head in a microwave oven. Further similarities are more properly coincidences relating to DFW’s life, not his most notorious novel. Comparatively IJ has a more straightforward narrative structure although notoriously does not bring the various story strands together completely, leaving them open but still converging. HoL does actually bring its narrative strands together and – like in IJ where you were following the third strand, weren’t you? The one which does actually intersect with the Gately and Incandenza narratives even if those two only link up in an implied universe? – the balance of themes turns out, like the owls, not to be what it seemed.

The owls never are what they seem. The question that the reader of fiction has to answer for herself is whether there ever were any owls and whether she wishes to accept the existence of owls. HoL involves the making of fiction via both Johnny Truant’s ‘life’ which may well be him spinning the most enormous li(n)e, and the ‘haunted house’ story – which isn’t really, it’s more like a Hollow Earth narrative. JT is a truly unlikeable narrator, a schmuck and an idle beggar, a useless eater and the rest of it. But you do – or I did – get used to him after a while as a kind of annoying jerkass who watches porn on your PC, boasts loudly about his sex tourism in Thailand, and shoves you down the apartment block stairs for a laugh. Especially when you realise that the haunted house narrative is closing down and there is a reason for this.

This is amazing. There are two narratives here, the book itself and another, squeezed haphazardly in the footnotes. I felt torn between the two narratives the whole way, impatient with the one as I was waiting to get back to the other.

The first one is by a man known as Zampanò, whose prose is exquisitely Lovecraftian. Speaking as someone who's actually reading Lovecraft at the same time, I'll say that this echoes those of his works which are most disturbing. And I mean that in the best way possible.

In between and among Zampanò's book is the other narrator, Johhnny Truant (the one who ostensibly "found" Zampanò's work), whose words are just... beautiful. Well, I say "beautiful." Mostly I mean the language is fascinating, even if what the words mean is anything but beautiful. It is a masterpiece of... not quite stream of consciousness, but nearly. Wandering, barely-connecting thoughts, but with punctuation, and occasionally coherence. It's so wandering, and full of black-ish whimsy. I love it. It's art, pure and simple.

Seriously, this book is like a Film - with a capital F, mind you - or like a goddamn surrealist avant-garde museum exhibit. Sometimes the words are upside down or backwards or slanted; often they make shapes on the pages (shapes which match the action or echo the mood); whole sentences are drawn out over several pages for effect. Everything means something, you're pretty sure - unless it doesn't, and you're just reading too much into it. Two thirds of the way through, and the storyline(s) just fell apart in my hands, crumbling into glorious madness.

And once having finished... I felt wrung out to dry.

I just... I wish he'd stop saying "alot." All I see is that bit from Hyperbole and a Half.

I was disappointed in this book. It started so promisingly; here was a spooky story written in a challenging way. We had two narrators, one dead, one so unreliable that you begin to question everything he says. Getting lost in the labyrinth along with the characters was genius. Then you begin to realize this story is going nowhere. Just twist and turns, but nothing is behind the door only more doors and empty hallways. I felt the character development was weak, the whole Johnny Truant story got tedious. The house was never explained, getting lost in it could have been really chilling (ha) with the growl and endless twists and turns and changes and impenetrable darkness. The psychological aspect could have been elaborated but it was just kind of left to fizzle.

Meh, I really wanted to like this but ultimately I felt let down. It could have been so much more IMHO of course.

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Review of House of Leaves

One word: beautiful.

Elaboration: The kind of beauty that is more pronounced since you see it surrounded by so much sadness and misery. The beauty for example of a pure-white lily, growing amidst the brown loam of a graveyard, or to invoke a more buddhist image, that of a lotus flower emerging pure white from the bottom muck and mud of a pond.

Specifics: The story is about a weird house and the family who moves there. The father is a world-famous photographer, a veteran of the warzones, more than a bit high-strung. There is his wife who is the love of his life, the mother his two children (a boy and a girl), a former model. The main story of the novel explores the unusual and supernatural things that happen to them and to those connected with them as they live in that house.

What is great about this is that the narration is unique. The narrator is unreliable, as he is an obsessed drug user. The framing is this: so this old guy dies, and in his apartment is found all these notes which turns out to be a book in progress. The narrator somehow becomes interested in how the pieces of the story unfolds and he takes it as his task to edit the notes into a book. The notes that the old man wrote becomes the main storyline of the novel. The narrator himself becomes an important part of the novel. Besides this, the actual text of the novel is presented in a dizzying manner. There are pages that only contain a few words. There are pages that are filled with just footnotes. The footnotes, my god, the footnotes, they are everywhere in this novel.

Conclusion: if you want something deep, something that you will be obsessed with, something that will keep you awake nights just so you can read some more of it, then this book is for you. reading the book is an unforgettable experience. so much so that upon finishing it, you would take the time to ponder and just let all the emotions sink in.

Dec 15, '11 10:49 AM
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I almost walked away from this book after the first hundred pages. Describing it as pretentious is akin to calling the Atlantic Ocean slightly damp. It's self-indulgent, painfully clever, and unrelentingly experimental -- enough to make you wish he'd stop experimenting for a second and just tell a freaking story. It's so full of post-modern wankery that you wonder what you, as a reader, have to do with it at all: one gets the impression the author expects readers to sort of admire it from afar instead of actually attempting to read it.

It has its oddly compelling moments, but on the whole it's about as exciting as reading a textbook for a post-modern film crit class. The author expects a LOT of effort on the part of the reader, while consistently failing to provide much of a return on that investment.

That having been said, I have to admit that by the time I finished the book, I had developed a grudging respect for it. While I would describe the work as a whole as kind of brilliant, I can't exactly say that I enjoyed reading it or, in good conscience, would recommend it. It's definitely... unique.