Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
More than the sum of its parts, 12 Nov 2001
By A Customer
Part academic paper, part horror story, part too-real-to-be-comfortable description of escalating insanity, part impenetrable footnote-maze, part (multi-)layered meta-novel - and fully enigmatic and wonderful, House of Leaves is one of the strangest and most memorable books I've ever read. A mere review can't possibly do it justice; isolated and analyzed, its very different and seemingly incompatible elements seem odd, frightening, pointless, sick, funny, and anything in between. Put together, though, the whole thing develops a thoroughly weird and unique attraction.
Having completed the book, I can image Mark Danielewski thrusting his fists skywards, cackling madly and roaring, Viktor Frankenstein-style: "It's alive!" It feels like something that shouldn't be alive but somehow still is.
Danielewski's creation is by no means flawless, the nuts and bolts show in places - but in most cases, I have the impression that the flaws and imperfections are intended.
This one is going to stick, keeping to the edges of my mind like shadows; never quite disappearing, and - when night comes - crawling out of hiding, demanding attention again.
|
|
|
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
Ashes to ashes ..., 19 Nov 2006
Style; unquestionably - Danielewski's postmodern blockbuster (complete with detailed footnotes to completely fictitious academic papers, crazily long lists in mirror writing, and "experimental" typesetting which at certain points becomes out-and-out concrete poetry) is as cool as they come. But for me, this unique book also has substance aplenty: indeed, it is an unexpectedly moving meditation on love as an act of faith and on the possibility of redemption, using the intertwined narratives concerning the troubled relationships of Will and Karen Navidson, and of Johnny Truant with his dead mother, to draw unexpected parallels.
The whole structure of the novel seems designed to highlight the impossibility of any account of events ever representing "objective truth" (another of Danielewski's central themes), as we get three separate people commenting on the same events from very different perspectives. At the start of the book, Johnny Truant (a troubled drop-out with a murky past who is now working as a tattoo artist) comes across a pile of paper (one of the senses of "Leaves" in the title) while clearing the apartment of the reclusive and recently-deceased old man Zapato. These "leaves" contain Zapato's scrawled narrative, written in pseudo-academic docu-drama style complete with footnotes, of the Navidson family's experience of moving into a Haunted House. In addition to Zapato's own footnotes, Johnny Truant adds footnotes which both comment on the Navidson narrative and relate his own ongoing story. To add another layer of complexity, a supposedly objective editor (Danielewski himself?) adds his own footnotes to Johnny's footnotes! Although both Will Navidson's and Johnny Truant's tales are chilling, the whole business of the footnotes and associated postmodern trickery has obvious comic potential, and Danielewski takes full advantage of this to poke fun at various targets: at celebrity culture; at the very American genre of the docu-drama; at previous "Horror" classics of book and film; and at postmodernism itself.
It's impossible to do the book justice in a few paragraphs. However, just when both Will Navidson's and Johnny's tales appear to be becoming ever darker and heading for a horrific end (as Navidson's house spontaneously grows an ever-enlarging labyrinth of barren, ash-walled corridors which gradually "eats" various family and friends, and Johnny's deteriorating mental state seems to be leading him into a drink- and drug-fuelled spiral of violence in which he risks becoming the very Minotaur haunting the Navidson house), Danielewski pulls off the most unexpected trick of all - the possibility of a "happy ending". And it is here that the book's true greatness lies.
Danielewski ultimately gives the reader a choice between two different readings of the words "ashes" and "leaves", both of which are as omnipresent throughout the book as the word "house" (which always appears in blue writing). The initially obvious meaning is that "leaves" refers to Zampano's description of the Navidson house's labyrinth (symbolising Death) and "ashes" refers both to the charred sheets among Zampano's papers and to the cold, dark walls of the labyrinth (images of Destruction). However, towards the end of the book when both Will Navidson and Johnny Truant may have been redeemed by acts of love (depending on exactly how the reader chooses to interpret certain passages), Danielewski offers an alternative reading, with "Ash" referring to the ash tree, which was the Tree of Life in Norse mythology, and "leaves" referring to the leaves of the tree which symbolise Life and Creation. The Happy Ending therefore becomes an act of faith on the part of the reader. To say more would be to risk a "plot spoiler" - but this changes the novel from being just a witty and entertaining postmodern horror story, into being something much richer and stranger.
|
|
|
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
Into the depths, 18 Jan 2006
An astute reader can come to gauge a writer through what he produces. And if this is so for "House of Leaves, then Mark Danielewski is a swirling mixture of the mad and the magnificent. This book is unlike any other that I have ever read -- hard and surreal, strange and magnificent.Will Navidson moves into a house with a secret, a door that leads into a bizarre tangle of stairways and passages. After his experiences are put down in the Navidson Record, a blind man named Zampanò makes further studies of the house -- and then the tattoo artist Johnny Truant, after Zampanò's death.As the reader goes deeper into the house (the word "house" isusually printed in blue), reality and perception start to warp... Trying to explain "House of Leaves" is like trying to explain "Mulholland Drive" in one sentence. Summarizing is hard enough; summarizing it briefly is virtually impossible. But if the actual story of "House of Leaves" is fantastic, then the way it's written is even better.It's sprinkled with anecdotes, letters (often with crossed-out lines), footnotes, lists, appendices, and pseudo-interview snippets from people like Anne Rice, Camille Paglia, David Copperfield, Stephen King, and Stanley Kubrick. There are pages that are entirely blotted out, or have only a single word, or are printed upside-down, sideways, tilted, running into a mess of letters, or in a spiral. There is poetry, pictures of tattered pages, musical notes, collages and paintings. Danielewski's style is amazing. It's in flux -- some parts of it, in keeping with who wrote it, are dry and flat (Zampanò), and some are more casual (Truant). But as the book grows darker and more surreal, it doesn't alienate -- instead, it draws you in and warps how you see the world for just a little while, as if the book is reaching out of its pages to grab the reader's brain. Almost like the house, one might say. The kind of terror and horror in "House of Leaves" are not the kind you read in hack horror books, where something transforms or a nasty thing leaps out of the shadows and eviscerates screaming extras. It's a creeping, subtle thing, like oil dripping over the surface of a pond. It's like a hallucination, surreal and continually shifting, where the laws of physics don't apply. This genre-busting post-modernist book is like taking a rollercoaster through a Dali-designed funhouse. Alone in its genre, it's a work of art. It will scare you, twist you, and linger in your mind without cheap tricks or flashy devices. Astounding.
| |
(2)
£4.40
(7)
£7.30
See all Product Description
(33 customer reviews)
