House of Leaves (Paperback)

I think this feeling was heightened by the typographical games Danielewski plays. For me these were one of the best parts of the book because the layout of the text seems to be mirroring what is happening or being talked about in the main part of the text, so for example in the Labyrinth chapter, the text is in unconnected blocks on the page which are the circuitous paths you read/walk by following the footnotes back and forth across the pages.

As for the footnotes themselves, someone else reviewed this and said that they are misleading but I think that is the whole point - throughout the book we are told that no-one apart from Zampano knows about The Navidson Record. He is deliberately using misleading or fictive quotes and sources to write a faux-academic paper about an imaginary film. The quotes and footnotes then are meant to add a touch of veracity to this game with fictive levels but should not be taken too seriously.

The one thing that got on my nerves was the whole Jonny Truant narrative. He rambles on for pages about not very much, his story is a lot less interesting than the main one and his diversions always seem to happen when the main story is at its most interesting. However, he is an essential component for understanding the book so I wouldn't advise skipping his parts - plus, towards the end a lot of the ideas etc seem to tie together around him. My own theory s that he is meant to be taken as the sole author of the whole work (i.e. he is Zampano and Jonny Truant) because there are lots of textual echoes between Zampano's bits and the letters of Jonny's mother.

At times I thought Danielewski seemed to be hinting at language's/text's (in)ability to represent space and with all the typographical games to be pushing at the boundaries of what can be represented (and how it can be represented). I'm sure someone's PhD is lying somewhere in this dense, encyclopedic novel full of ideas as there is such an inexhaustible stream of information that it could take years of study to understand it from all it's different angles. I think Danielewski is sending up whilst at the same time working within this academic framework with many of the footnotes which are speculating about the film's possible meaning (in fact, it's almost worth reading just for these which rip-take the pointless, convoluted, preposterous ideas of mainly American, mainly literary academics).

All in all, this book is not for the fainthearted, is hard work to read but contains an intriguing story, and ambitious and poetic textual experimentation which make it a rewarding read.

If you're into the whole non-linear, multiple narrative thing but want a read that isn't quite as complex as this try Perec's 'Life A User's Manual' and Calvino's 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller'.