Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

House Of Leaves

Page: 1(2)

04:03 / 19.08.08

I'm wading through it. It's something I am going to have to complete, but I've started to notice things... the last time we measured this house for carpet...
.. and the new one is written in two directions. hmmm

14:51 / 20.08.08

I thought it was fantastic. Yeah, of course it didn't get summed up neatly, or at all in fact, but I think that that was to be expected from the start. Even if it had been possible to come up with a neat and "satisfying" ending I think that wrapping the book up that way would have undermined a lot of what had gone before. Often this method of leaving things hanging is used as a cop-out for a creatively bankrupt author who can't figure out an ending but in House of Leaves I genuinely don't think that that was the case.
That aside, I loved the footnotes and the turning upside down and the nods to Borges and Calvino in a kind of "pop" format that really worked - all mixed in with a genuinely creepy horror story of the kind that I don't normally tend to read.
That's not to say that it was perfect of course; although it's a while since I read it I seem to remember moments when it sagged and directions that the book took (while not taking others), where, with hindsight, I wish it had gone the other way. Still, even with those caveats, it's a huge achievement and quite easily succeeds in avoiding being merely gimmicky. On the other hand, despite all that, I have to say that I'm not too keen to rush into his next book which, from the descriptions, sounds worryingly as though he has had to find a new way to capture people's attention in the same way as before. If you see what I mean.

nyarlathotep's shoe horn

01:40 / 24.08.08

there was a quotation from Jung in it somewhere (I couldn't locate it for the life of me after the fact ~ note to self: pay attention to that little voice that insists on doing things NOW) that sums it up nicely.

it describes the house as the ultimate metaphor of the house as oneself, with the foundation representing one's cultural inheritence, the basement as the subconscious, the main floors as the conscious mind and the attic as the bats in the belfry. I can't recall the exact correlations, but it tied the material of the halls in the mysterious basement together with the house as metaphor.

if anyone can find this quote for me, me and my inner voice will thank you and shower you with adoration.

08:16 / 24.08.08

I used the amazon option "search inside this book" and Jung came up three times:

1. on Page 353:
"... his wife, as well as alluded to in chapter Six of The Interpretation of Dreams and in a letter to Jung dated February 25, 1908.323 323Heine?324 324Freud. - Ed. ..."

2. on Page 398:
"... Hollow" published in the T.S. Eliot Journal v. 32, November 1994; chapter four in Oona Fanihdjarte's The Constancy of Carl Jung (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Gordon Kearns, L. ..."

3. from Back Matter:
"... That would be a sort of picture of our mental structure. C. G. Jung "Mind and the Earth" Je ne vois qu'infini par toutes les fenêtres. ..."

08:21 / 24.08.08

Found it on page 646, on the first page of Appendix F (Various Quotes):

We have to describe and explain a building, the upper story of which was
erected in the nineteenth century; the ground floor dates fromthe sixteenth
century, and a careful examination of the masonry discloses the fact that it
was reconstructed from a dwelling-tower of the eleventh century. In the
cellar we discover Roman foundation walls, and under the cellar a filled-in
cave, in the floor of which stone tools are found and remnants of glacial fauna
in the layers below. That would be a sort of picture of our mental structure.

- C. G. Jung "Mind and the Earth"

07:16 / 05.09.08

xkcd obviously just read it, tee hee. I love the blue house in house salsa

admiral sausage

11:25 / 10.01.09

On a bit of a tangent (sorry)

I was reading this book when I worked in a BT call centre. I was sat there with the phone off the hook, the book open and I was deciphering a section of the book, which I think was a letter from the main characters mother that was written in code. My boss came over to see why I hadn't taken any calls for 1/2 an hour he saw me writing something like " The porters, they abuse me, pull off my clothes" .... I got called in for a diceplinery. Didn't get fired just made to sit next to the team leader for the rest of my short stay there.

05:27 / 21.02.09

Glad I tried HoL, but as much as I wanted to like it, it just didn't come together for me. Sadly, it went back to the library unfinished. Probably more of a statement about my impatience than about the quality of the book, though!

20:48 / 19.01.11

i like this, but i didn't love it.

i thought there were a lot of neat structural ideas, but the whole things feels kind of hollow because the story at the heart of it just isn't that special.

it's almost like lovecraft - a handful of incredibly compelling ideas that stop you in your tracks, and then a whole lot of the author repeatedly tripped over their own feet. except that i find howard a lot more endearing. maybe it's a local new england pride thing.

Page: 1(2)