House of Leaves (2000)

Holy crap I finished! If anyone has seen this book in its physical form I'm sure you can understand the need for celebration. (If you haven't seen this, it's a beast.)

I'm not even sure what to say about this book. So here are some random statements for you to enjoy.

This is insane. This has entirely way too many footnotes. And changing the font to differentiate between who's talking? Doesn't help. Seriously, what is the point in having the word 'house' be blue? If I ever move into a house that has some doorway mysteriously appear that leads to some deep, dark, cold hallway I'm not exploring. I'm fucking moving, end of. Who the fuck installs cameras all over their house? It's like Real World, just in a freaky man-eating house. These guys, especially Lude, have A LOT of sex. But seriously, what's the point in sharing this with us readers? I really couldn't give a shit less. And if Johnny Truant is supposed to have stopped showering weeks ago and doesn't really leave his house or eat real food anymore, and looks like some disgusting hobo how is he still able to hook up with all these hot babes? And how exactly does one go about having sex on a Nordic Track? Nevermind, don't answer that. Of course! That makes complete sense. You just saw the house eat someone and you decide to go explore again. Sure, why the fuck not? Maybe you'll get lucky and it's just not hungry anymore. So, he's burning that book... is that supposed to be the book we're reading and if so how did it end up in that old guys house? And I still don't understand the claw marks in the wood next to his body. Did anyone perform an autopsy? Oh! So we were also supposed to have picked up on clues in this jumbled mess? About your Mother? I can barely understand what the fuck is going on let alone find the CLUES. Is this some type of Freud thing that went over my head? I still don't get what the growling was.

So, I have one final question: Was ANYONE supposed to understand this or was the author just being cute fully intending on leaving everyone completely clueless? ( )

The only reason I didn't give this book 5 stars is because it's a little tough to follow at times. Much like "Gravity's Rainbow", don't pick this up if you want an easy read.

It's hard not to give anything away, but let's just say a labyrinth, ghostly, box of letters, kind of journal thing has just fallen into your lap. Get out your flashlights...although they won't help you.

This book stays with you, and makes it hard to sleep for some reason. ( )

I cannot make up my mind about this book.

I might do a proper review, at some point but a. I have no idea what to feel about it, and b. my boyfriend can see this and hasn't read it yet and I don't want to spoil it for him; though I'm not sure if I could.

Waaargh. ( )

Premetto che l'ho già scambiato Cito il titolo della recensione di Q (tummirammenterai, leggo ora tra le sue righe); se invece di limitarmi a citarlo ora, mi fossi fidato di più di lui non avrei sprecato 22 euro e parecchie ore per leggerlo (più che leggerlo dovrei dire ruotarlo in tutte le direzioni, seguire cacce al tesoro, cercare dove gli è venuto in mente di terminare quella frase, ...). Ci aveva già provato Marinetti quasi cento anni fa a fare i libri "ergodici": direi un fallimento totale ma Marinetti ha il grande merito di aver sperimentato un genere nuovo. L'ergodicità di casa di foglie mi sembra una fatica inutile, mi fa venire in mente i libri per bambini che fanno suoni o si aprono a teatrino; la differenza è che certi libri per bambini possono essere davvero molto belli. Molte pagine di questo libro mi ricordano i discorsi sconclusionati e vaneggianti che si fanno quando si è stonati pesantemente: sembrano bellissimi e profondi, se ti azzardi a risentirli o rileggerli dopo, ti sembrano banalità assurde (prego, apprezzate l’ossimoro). Cosa c'entra Odifreddi? Mi aveva incuriosito lui, citandolo positivamente nel Matematico Impenitente ... Piergiorgio si fa pari con gli altri libri (belli) che avevi consigliato! ( )

Six-word review: Labyrinthine journey into the in{finite|ternal|conceivable|vasive|explicable|nermost} darkness.

Extended review:

I've awarded a rare (for me) five stars to House of Leaves. I feel a strange reluctance to offer such an unqualified endorsement, yet to give it anything less would be to make a mockery of my own ranking system.

Reading this book reminds me of viewing a Surrealist painting by Dali or a Cubist work by Picasso: I feel that I'm being had by a brilliant con artist. The brilliance is undeniable, and yet at the same time I can't escape a sense that I'm being duped, manipulated, toyed with--not in the honest illusion of theatre or poetry but more in the way of a stage magician whose stock in trade is an ability to ensnare our senses in defiance of reason.

The naked shell of the story is the disturbing, menacing, and ultimately madness-inducing effect, whether real or hallucinated (and what is real?), of a grotesque anomaly within what otherwise appears to be an ordinary house. The principal figures, whom I would rather call "presences" than "characters," are the couple who own the house, the phenomena of which the husband has attempted to document on film; the old man called Zampanó, recently deceased, who has left a massive, jumbled manuscript analyzing the film record; and the man named Johnny Truant who finds, assembles, and annotates the old man's opus.

The dramatic interplay among three parallel narratives is almost the least of it. The narratives themselves, bizarrely arresting in their own right, seem to exist primarily to furnish the pretext for special effects. And these are special effects of the first order, accomplishing results that I have never seen perpetrated on paper before.

The book, by the way, must be read on paper. Even if you should find it in another medium, don't bother to try. The physical object itself is a palpable element of the story in a way not even attained by the posthumous volume The Original of Laura, the heartbreaking spectre of the once-great Nabokov devolved into a shamelessly overpriced gimmick. The awareness of being manipulated by gimmicks is exactly what triggered my resistance here, in much the same way that I decline to succumb to any form of religious persuasion; and yet, like the calculated effects in Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, they worked.

They worked because I let them, and I let them because, so help me, I wanted them to work. The same shadowy part of me that relishes Poe's flirtation with madness until he became its slave; that sees through the eyes of Raskolnikov just long enough to imagine justifying his act of murder, before recoiling in horror; that follows the narrator of The Blind Owl through his sanity-eroding surrealistic hall of mirrors--that shadow-self longs to be possessed utterly by something akin to oblivion, too alien to be evil, too absolute to be qualified.

Extravagant language? Yes, it is. And it must be to do it justice, even if justice might best be served by silent wild-eyed laughter.

House of Leaves is a story, or indeed several stories, of love, obsession, madness, myth, and mystery. Its subterranean stairway to hell is as fascinating and terrifying as the dreamscapes that afford us glimpses of the murky depths lying just beneath quotidian consciousness. Somewhere in those dark corridors there must be graffiti: C. Jung was here.

The book is also a complex, multilayered puzzle, an impossible fantasy in which nothing is accidental. Like its esteemed 1962 predecessor, the ground-breaking Pale Fire of Vladimir Nabokov (reviewed here), it tells a significant part of its story in the ancillary material: in this case, not only foreword, introduction, annotations, and index but also title page, exhibits, appendixes (poems, letters, news items, quotations, and more), endleaves, and use of color. It also employs the graphic format of certain pages in a way that makes me think of the abstract paintings of Mark Rothko: the content is present only to provide an occasion for the form. Is it necessary to read every word? Will I miss something if I don't, or does it amount to reading a passage of Lorem Ipsum and looking for meaning in it? I read every word.

I even found and compulsively marked what I believe were actual typos, as opposed to deliberate typos included for some elusive purpose. You couldn't have paid me enough to proofread this book, and I have proofread algebra, statistics, and chemistry books for money.

I lack the bravado to say I found all the clues and solved all the puzzles. I'd be happy to think I got better than half of them. But I do know why there are pages with inset squares of text within a wall of other text, why some text is printed in reverse, why there are pages with only one word on them, and why some pages look like the aftermath of an explosion in a type foundry. A linear reading is literally not possible. In fact, I'm tempted to suggest reading the backmatter before delving into the primary content because so much of it illuminates the main storylines--if illumination can even be spoken of in this context.

For a while after I had finished the book, I kept reading, kept looking, kept studying the exhibits--loath to close the covers before being certain that I had seen all there was to see, like a drunkard shaking the upended bottle for one last drop, like a stoner swallowing the roach.

And then--one long exhalation. I waited for my head to clear. It didn't. I think it took me three days for the inside of my brain to shrink back to its normal dimensions, and there are still furrows, cubbyholes, and (less benignly) tunnels that I don't remember noticing before. Is this a safe place to inhabit any more?

Was it ever?
 
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