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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

House Of Leaves

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13:22 / 23.01.02

I just started reading this over the weekend and I'm pleasantly surprised at both the intensity and immense organization of the whole thing. Has anyone else read it?

It's a faux manuscript about another manuscript about a documentary on a house that is bigger on the inside than the outside.

It sounded terribly pretentious to me at first, mixing David Foster Wallace style footnotes with a Stephen King or Blair Witch genre plot device. Some pages have upside down text, one words per page, backwards text and other design elements that incorporate themselves into the madness of the story's progress. Every time the word "house" is used, it is inked in blue.

I've heard the author is the pop singer Poe's brother and that they collaborated on a record that goes along with the book.

13:47 / 23.01.02

I like to think of it as an elegant failure. It was an interesting idea that really falls to pieces towards the end. When I first started reading it there were parts that gave me chilling sleepless nights, but as it progressed it lost a lot of that quality. I still admire his attempt, though...

The Return Of Rothkoid

13:56 / 23.01.02

I like to think of it as a big subbing headache. And not quite as good as the blurb makes it out to be.

[rimshot]

I don't know - I just felt it didn't live up to the hype, in quite a big way. Nice idea, but... just didn't all come together. I'm with BizCo, pretty much - some excellent moments that became fewer and fewer as it went on.

14:07 / 23.01.02

Yeah, Bret Easton Ellis really cums all over himself in his blurb for the book, doesn't he? Something about Danielzewski's work sodomizing Delillo and Pynchon with the rusty prick of Christ, IIRC. That sets a new standard for hyperbole.

14:09 / 23.01.02

Oh, and the Johnny Truant pages/footnotes are truly awful in a pedestrian "written in the early 90s" way.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

16:17 / 23.01.02

I struggled all the way through it and thought it was wank. I kept going because I thought thta at any moment many of the teasers he gave out would become a more interesting storyline, like when the story threatens to erupt out of the book. But now! Mundanity triumphs! And the whole typeface/layout thing? Doesn't make it interesting, just a pain in the arse to read. I suppose the whole point of the book is that none of the questions (such as why did this old guy write a 'factual' book about things that never happened, why did he die, what is happening to the current editor?) are answered, which makes me want to chuck it on the big pile of wank pile. Luckily, I did do a search on the internet for the author and found out, yes he is an egotistical tosser, which is probably why Easton Ellis raves about him.

19:51 / 23.01.02

I found it interesting for a few dozen pages, although I admit - for my sins - that I only picked it up because of the Bret Easton Ellis recommendation (I shall presumably be purged in the clensing fires of hell for this).

After the dozen or so pages however, it started to go awry, and I've got to agree with some of the others here, it was just plain awful by the end.

That said, I still think it's an interesting book, although for it's style rather than for it's actual content (art for arts sake, kind of thing).

[ 23-01-2002: Message edited by: Tezcatlipoka ]

09:11 / 24.01.02

I actually enjoyed this book - and yes, it is a pain in the ass to read - but I think that was the point - the way the book mirrored the house (footnotes that went no where -- the crazy typography mirroring the maze of hallways etc.etc.) All the failures in the book were necessary to maintain the structure of the whole idea -- and even though it sometimes didn't make for great reading -- afterwards, looking back at the whole work, I don't think the piece would have been as rewarding without them.

Where the book suceeded, for me, were some of the images and ideas the story planted in my head -- the documentry maker riding his mountain bike down that endless hallway (clocking 300 to 400 miles a day because the floor tilts in whatever direction he travels), the house eating his brothers hand, being stuck on a ledge floating in the void with nothing left to do but read the book you've brought with you - but you don't have any light so you've got to burn the book as you go -- reading that last page while it is still burning and the dread of knowing the darkness and emptiness that will follow. Ahhh sweet.

Not a classic piece of literature - but an enjoyable (if you're willing to work) piece of pulp fiction - like a modern day Lovecraft ...

Anyway ...

I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts about THE GREATEST EIGHT (or however long it was) MINUTES OF FILM EVER .... ???

I tend to agree with the narrator (that in considering the books theme and motifs -- ala the darkness itself being the monster)that those eight (or six) minutes of black screen (near the end) would be the greatest six minutes of film ever made ... uh huh, I think (after all that has happened) it would be spine tingling ... especially if the theatre killed the exit lights ... sitting in the absolute darkness of the movie theatre with only the narrators Dolby surround sound enhanced breathing and final words to keep you tethered to the world ...

Now my question -- if they (the film makers) could pull it off - would you sit through six to eight minutes of black screen ???

I finished the damn book ...

...so I guess I would.

Foust is SO authentic

02:28 / 15.11.02

I'm reading this right now, about 75 pages in. I'm having a hard time forming an opinion... for every scene that has me looking over my shoulder, there's 2 that I want to skip.

How much of Johnny Truants foot notes are necessary? Can I skip them, and still understand the core narrative? It's not that I find them terribly boring, I was just thinking I might skip them now and read them afterwards.

08:08 / 15.11.02

His footnotes tell you that either A- Danielewski had a lot of sex or B Danielewski knows the basics of Chaos Magick and wants to have a lot of sex.

11:53 / 15.11.02

there is a lot of coded info in the book, including in the letters in the back. pick a few of them, and take the first letter in each word, see what you get. There are a series of other encoded elements in the book. another example: on page 64, take the first letters of each photographer's last name on footnote 75, starting with lucien aigner..... , so here, take the letter _a_... , then _L_... etc.

for more of this madness, go to www.houseofleaves.com- huge site dedicated to the book (which, btw, I enjoyed very much for the first half, and was less taken with the last half).

Our Lady of The Two Towers

11:55 / 15.11.02

The footnotes are, to various degrees, necessary (even the ones that are crossed out I've been told) but the appendixes ARE pointless.

14:29 / 15.11.02

I disagree. The Whalestoe letters are the emotional heart of the book, crucial to understanding Truant. I'm also thinking of re-reading the Pelican Poems, having found out that the pelican nurtures its young with its own blood.

21:10 / 15.11.02

The Whalestoe letters are indeed that emotional heart of the book. Not only do that redeem the book, after the Look! A big hole I have dug for myself! Let's never dig myself out!! I could build a system of tunnels and live down here for ever!!! ending of the story proper, but BY FUCK ARE THEY GOOD.

Which does not, ofcourse, excusse the fact that the little bastard reprinted them, with a couple of "never before released" letters, as a seperate book. Wanker.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

12:41 / 16.11.02

Well, I think by this point I was so fucked off that I was skim reading to the end. I don't recall there being any relevence to the story now, but it was 2 years ago...

Foust is SO authentic

17:36 / 28.11.02

Have any of you tried to work out the more obscure aspects of the plot? For example, one of the Whalestoe Letters has the coded phrase, "Zampano, who did you lose?" How would Pelafina know who Zampano is?

13:28 / 07.02.03

I loved this book. Form and content reflecting each other, ace. Agreed the guy might be up his own arse, but he spent eleven years writing the thing and it shows- I like that there are huge complex books that are intractable and difficult to read, and I was hooked by this from start to... (well, I did skip some of the footnotes etc. near the end because I wanted to see what happened at the) finish. Great Horror.

Constitution Hill

14:11 / 07.02.03

Yeah, I loved this one too. Though I have to say that reading it in two consecutive 5-hour stints on dark & dismal train journeys may have helped the horror of it all. Unfortunately i lent it to a friend a few years ago and only just picked up another copy a few months ago [£9 this time]. Don't know if or when i'll read it again.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

10:26 / 08.02.03

It's like the opposite of the Maze of the Minotaur isn't it. Incredibly dense and difficult to get into, with numerous secret tunnels between part of the document which ultimately end up at dead ends and bricked-up walls that prevent entry rather than exit.

Cloned Christ on a HoverDonkey

01:37 / 20.05.04

To me the book was a morass of masturbation infused with some truly outstanding concepts and images.

The footnotes, it seemed to me, were only there for the most part to lend false gravitas to the statements he was making in the main text.

Having said that, I read every single word from start to finish, which can't be an entirely bad thing. The book, I think, was at least partially intended to challenge our innate expectations of waht a book is. This book works spectacularly on so many levels that it's such a disappointment when it doesn't work as a whole.

I still want to explore that house, though.

14:35 / 21.05.04

To me the book was a morass of masturbation infused with some truly outstanding concepts and images.

To my mind it was a morass of masturbation infused with some fairly hackneyed sub-Vertigo comics goth-psychology claptrap.

I mean, maybe I was missing something, but my only thought upon finishing the bloody thing was: what was the point of all that then, aside from wasting a week of my life?

The introduction and the unusual framework of the book promised much, but actually reading it was like a slap in the face (and not in a good way).

There were a few interesting ideas scattered around admittedly, but they were just so constantly squandered and padded out with chapter after chapter of thunderously ostentatious bollocks.

Possibly you could drag a fairly good 100 page novella out of it, concentrating on the stuff with the house, which was fairly well done, but..

..well I can't be bothered to launch into a full critique right now, maybe later if anybody cares.

00:02 / 23.05.04

The best bit was when the house was fucked up.

06:52 / 23.05.04

I read this a couple years ago and was fascinated by the "book within a book", the Navidson Story (or whatever). Creepy and unsettling, that, but the first-person narrative was extremely indulgent and ultimately uninteresting. The funky footnotes and red (and blue?) type was a cute gimmick, but nothing more.

The Apple-Picker

02:25 / 24.05.04

I liked it. A lot. It was the first book I couldn't put down since I used to read a Nancy Drew book every night before I fell asleep.

When I picked the book up at B&N, I poo-pooed it because I have a disdainful suspicion of gimmickry, but I put it on reserve through my library anyway. I can't remember if I wanted to prove myself right or if I wanted to give the book a chance to prove me wrong.

The book and its appendices invite inspection and connection, but I wasn't reading the book with any interest in analyzing it. After reading it, I liked that it was disjointed and gimmicky. I really liked everything about it, whether or not blue or scattered typography distracted or detracted from the story.

It probably helped that by the time the book made its way down my library's reserve list and finally into my name and hands, it had been read so many times that the cover had to be taped on and the pages were a little grimy and banged up. I can appreciate why other people wouldn't or don't like the book, but for me, the jumble that was left in the end was just right--a jumble of sloppiness and craft and into something that isn't really cohesive. But I think that's what makes it work. The book is making a legend, and that's how legends are: a mishmash of retellings.

The whole thing made me feel the way I do when I read Found Magazine or look at pictures of abandoned homes, cemetaries, hospitals, whatever on ForgottenOhio.com.

Foust is SO authentic

02:20 / 11.05.05

I just read it again, and found a whole new love for it. Maybe I'm easily impressed, I don't know. But after gaining a passing familitarity with Derrida, Baudrillard and semiotics, the book read entirely differantly.

My new favourite bit: discussing all the layers the crushing of Tom's hand goes through to reach the read. From Tom's actual hurt, to Navy's perception of it, to Navy's description of it to Reston, to Reston's description in the interview, through Zampano and his scribe, through Truant, through the editors, and finally to the reader. Just fascinating.

All the playing with absence and presence? "Absence makes the heart grow fonder," indeed.

And the 13 mile staircase still makes me go "fuck yeah!"

02:59 / 06.06.05

I’ve read this book twice (too much free time) and it’s quite possibly the only thing I’ve ever enjoyed so much the second time around.
I understand the common criticisms of the book: it’s density, it’s chaotic story, the sheer deluge of material it throws at the reader, etc. But I think it’s also those very things that make it a masterpiece. Nothing is there just to be there. (Unlike Moby Dick, for example.) Even parts that are apparently superfluous within the context of the narrative become relevant in their transition to the reader. When you look at it not just as a story about Navidson or Johnny (not that you shouldn’t, they’re interesting characters) but an exercise in the art of turning the very process of story inside out, you get to enjoy it as a mindfuck as well as a novel.
It wasn’t until the second time I read it that I realized the following possibility: Johnny is in fact batshit insane and except for a few tattoo shop anecdotes is making the whole thing up as a way of exorcizing his demons. The novel, the beast, Zampano, everything. This also explains why every woman he encounters seems hell bent on fucking his brains out. I’m not saying it’s necessarily right, but it changed everything. It was like I was reading a whole different novel. It’s the mark of a great work that it contains a certain level of ambiguity that the audience has to fill in. Thus the work is not just a one way transmission from the author but a reciprocative (is that a word?) process. It becomes about the reader. There’s some phrase for this, but I forget.
By defying at every turn the readers expectations of what a book should be it breaks out of the linear constraints of the audience’s expectations and becomes something else entirely: whatever the reader wants it to be.
Sorry if it sounds like I’m writing an essay, that’s collegiate programming for ‘ya.

15:52 / 21.07.05

I thought this book was great. Haven't read it in awhile, but here's my take on it (from what I can remember of it):

I liked how the author explored and played with the notion of narratives. Any narrative is, by nature, seemingly autonomous and independent; they can only co-exist with other narratives that share the same premise/'universe'/'rules'/context. But here we have narratives that bleed into each other; symbols/glyphs/words that recur across the narratives (like 'minotaur' and 'house' - words which in some special edition are always printed in colour every time they occur, regardless of context).

The consistent colouration of certain words suggest that they are SIGNIFICANT in a LARGER SENSE that spans the narratives; but here is classic poststructuralism: these are signifiers that do not point toward anything signified. They are road signs without meaning.

I also liked the impenetrable nature of the 'monster', and by extension, the book itself. The author does not leave us with a coherent, complete narrative/account of events by the end of the book. Like Navidson's experience inside the hallway, the reader is given a cursory, individualised (through Johnny, and then through the individual reader) glimpse at a fragment of the incomprehensible and obfuscated 'whole truth' that we all believe the author has up his sleeve. This 'whole truth' would be the complete narrative that would explain everything and narrativise Zampano, Johnny, his mother, the Navidsons into a complete story that would make sense. Readers take it in faith that all authors have such a 'whole truth' lurking behind every novel; I posit that Danielwski deliberately omitted one here, and turned its absence into a central theme of the book - deflecting any potential criticism of him as just being plain lazy.

16:43 / 22.07.05

As a side note, the Poe album is called "Haunted" and it's about the death of their father, with elements of the novel included in a metaphorical sense (the song "Five and a Half Minute Hallway", for example.) Unfortunately I haven't read the novel, but I do recommend the album.

13:57 / 11.08.05

The letters from his mother alone are genius.

My Mom Thinks I'm Cool

11:59 / 28.11.06

So first off I'd have to agree with most of everyone in this thread - I thought House of Leaves was a sweet idea that was poorly executed, or maybe something that would have been brilliant if it were half as good as the guy writing it thought it was, or something. The inner story about the house was great. The meta stories about people writing about people writing about a house and why they're going nuts was even cooler. The gimmicky one word on a page stuff and the word "house" in blue...seemed silly. About as groundbreaking as your average Dr. Suess book. The thick lists and footnotes and appendices, I thought, were tiring but purposefully so, and fairly well done.

So! I am both excited and nervous about a new book by the same author which is now out in hardback: Only Revolutions: A Novel. I picked one up in the bookstore and found that it's written in two directions, by two of the characters in the book simultaneously, and it's "recommended by the publisher" that you read 8 pages of one and then switch to the other. Again, if I hadn't seen a book that goes in two directions before it might be kind of a neat gimmick, but I have. In fucking comic books, when I was about 8.

I don't suppose anyone's already read the new one? This for me might be the critical moment - was the first book a Good Idea, Flawfully Executed - in which case this one might be totally awesome, assuming he's learned from his mistakes - or is the author a big egotistical jerkoff who thinks I've never read a book with non-standard type before and that it's going to blow my mind?

My Mom Thinks I'm Cool

11:59 / 28.11.06

oh, and thanks for the tip on the Poe album - if only I'd read that a week ago when my friend was here offering to let me copy it.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

14:18 / 28.11.06

Thread on Only Revolutions here, though I must confess I still haven't read the book. It's not so much the type that's putting me off- it's that I so very, very much want it to be really good, and as much fun as HoL was, and I don't want to be disappointed.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

14:44 / 28.11.06

As in (almost) all things, I'm on board with Stoats. HoL set the bar really high (I loved it; it's the only book that's ever actually given me nightmares) and a second "gimmick" book really makes me worry about crutching.

12:27 / 29.11.06

Ditto. I'm wary of disappointment, I want the hairs on my arms to stand up again and people to look at me funny on the tube when reading it. Especially because HoL took thirteen years to write or whatever, how can the next book match up?

17:54 / 22.09.07

A bit late... the book is good. Tedious, but if you get it, you can see how i[] works.
From some people the gimmicks are that. I see the footnotes as the endless hallways that are empty of any real meaning. Grab your fishing line and hold on.
The book is the HOUSE. I like that. Anybody that gets over excited by this book will be lead to the door and reactions vary.
You get Darkness. Not that fun.
I like how the people here who didn't like it, felt that it got worse as you moved through it. Uncanny.

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