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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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