House of Leaves

8	Rating (52 ratings)

Add to favorites

Edit page

Buy at Amazon

Written by

Mark Z. Danielewski

Lists

90 votes

Listal's Favorite Books (The Results) (340 items)
list by Mr. Saturn

Published 10 years, 2 months ago

58 comments

39 votes

30 days of books (36 items)
list by the giraffe

Published 12 years, 10 months ago

9 comments

21 votes

GruntLogic's Favorite Books (102 items)
list by GruntLogic

Published 12 years, 2 months ago

4 comments

21 votes

The BBCs Big Read (200 items)
list by tartan_skirt

Published 16 years, 10 months ago

1 comment

18 votes

1,000 Greatest Books I've Read...[ongoing] (343 items)
list by ToonHead2102

Published 12 years, 2 months ago

3 comments

View all House of Leaves lists (5 more)

Pictures

View all House of Leaves pictures

Description: Amazon.com Review Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves. Mark Z. Danielewski's first novel has a lot going on: notably the discovery of a pseudoacademic monograph called The Navidson Record, written by a blind man named Zampanò, about a nonexistent documentary film--which itself is about a photojournalist who finds a house that has supernatural, surreal qualities. (The Amazon.com Review
Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves. Mark Z. Danielewski's first novel has a lot going on: notably the discovery of a pseudoacademic monograph called The Navidson Record, written by a blind man named Zampanò, about a nonexistent documentary film--which itself is about a photojournalist who finds a house that has supernatural, surreal qualities. (The inner dimensions, for example, are measurably larger than the outer ones.) In addition to this Russian-doll layering of narrators, Danielewski packs in poems, scientific lists, collages, Polaroids, appendices of fake correspondence and "various quotes," single lines of prose placed any which way on the page, crossed-out passages, and so on.
Now that we've reached the post-postmodern era, presumably there's nobody left who needs liberating from the strictures of conventional fiction. So apart from its narrative high jinks, what does House of Leaves have to offer? According to Johnny Truant, the tattoo-shop apprentice who discovers Zampanò's work, once you read The Navidson Record,

For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.

We'll have to take his word for it, however. As it's presented here, the description of the spooky film isn't continuous enough to have much scare power. Instead, we're pulled back into Johnny Truant's world through his footnotes, which he uses to discharge everything in his head, including the discovery of the manuscript, his encounters with people who knew Zampanò, and his own battles with drugs, sex, ennui, and a vague evil force. If The Navidson Record is a mad professor lecturing on the supernatural with rational-seeming conviction, Truant's footnotes are the manic student in the back of the auditorium, wigged out and furiously scribbling whoa-dude notes about life.
Despite his flaws, Truant is an appealingly earnest amateur editor--finding translators, tracking down sources, pointing out incongruities. Danielewski takes an academic's--or ex-academic's--glee in footnotes (the similarity to David Foster Wallace is almost too obvious to mention), as well as other bogus ivory-tower trappings such as interviews with celebrity scholars like Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom. And he stuffs highbrow and pop-culture references (and parodies) into the novel with the enthusiasm of an anarchist filling a pipe bomb with bits of junk metal. House of Leaves may not be the prettiest or most coherent collection, but if you're trying to blow stuff up, who cares? --John Ponyicsanyi

... (more)

Manufacturer: Pantheon
Release date: 7 March 2000
ISBN-10 : 0375703764 | ISBN-13: 9780375703768

Tags: Horror (6), Fiction (4), Metafiction (3), 2000s (3), Usa (2), Postmodern (2), Novel (2), Novels (2), Postmodernism (2), 2006 (2), Satire (2), Romance (2), Debut (2), North America (2), 2007 (2), Speculative Fiction (2), 1001 Books TBR (2), Footnotes (2), Metafictionality (2), Non-Euclidian Horror (1)

My tags:

Add tags

Update feed

SomethingCoolIDK added this to a list 2 years, 6 months ago

Books I Own (58 books items)

ToonHead2102 added this to a list 3 years, 1 month ago

UPDATED Life Status Toonhead Part 3 (5 tv items)

"So, cutting to the chase--off we went!!! As for the trip itself... heh heh, I was told by a friend upon my return, this is rather 'typical' for a first time travel experience. You know how often we get saddled on these travel experiences where virtually everything that CAN go wrong, DOES? Anybody ever experience anything like that?... well this was one of those kinda trips. The kind where NOTHING goes according to plan. And as my friend told me upon my return, those usually make for the absolu"

axrhodes added this to a list 5 years, 11 months ago

My 50 Favorite Books (50 books items)

axrhodes added this to a list 6 years, 4 months ago

Top 50 Scariest Books (50 books items)

Marian posted a image 6 years, 10 months ago

dctclibrary added this to a list 6 years, 11 months ago

1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (1001 books items)

Read
Condition
Added date
Private notes Only visible to you
or cancel