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Danielewski/Escher OTP
Apr. 16th, 2011 01:28 amOkay, so I'm finally reading Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves and this book is insane. The footnotes are like the house's hallways, and sometimes the hallways are rooms. The story is about spatial horror, and it manages to simulate this disorientation in the book itself through its footnotes - initially innocuous, increasingly bizarre, increasingly difficult to navigate, getting bigger and bigger until eventually they consume entire pages. Annotations and errata edging out the narrative. But is it that the narrative is the annotations and errata, or rather, the narrative is the act of consumption and edging out? Can you break the fourth wall if you can't find it?
And it's not just the footnotes. Formatting eventually decides to fuck off and leave us to our own devices (or does it? The absence of formatting is also part of the narrative). And even this, the act of sharing with you my thoughts feels like I'm part of the fucking story, because isn't people ruminating and debating it the whole point? This is not a book that tells a story. The story sidles in sideways; the story is implied. It's like Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides but with a house instead of depressed teenage girls, aha. This is fiction that has, by virtue of its subject and construction, found a way out of the Matrix and IT IS COMING FOR US NEXT.
IN SHORT, THIS BOOK IS TROLLING ME. Seriously, people who have read this before, how did you deal with it? I glaze over the exhaustive lists of names, for example, but did you follow instructions and refer to the appendices and exhibits every time? I'm on page 139 at the part where Holloway just shot Wax, and Jed has managed to get them away by plunging deeper into the labyrinth, which is relatively early, yeah, but already my head is spinning and you guuuuuuyyyssssfdslkjflksjfal.
( more thoughts on House of Leaves )
If you like this book, you might also like: Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions. Do you like stories about people consumed by their obsessive quest for something liminal? They fall deeper and deeper into that rabbit hole until suddenly their world is upside down. I was reminded very much of Auster's book as I read this. I loved The Book of Illusions, and I am enjoying the hell out of House of Leaves, and I'll tell you more about it once I find my way out of the fucking thing.
And it's not just the footnotes. Formatting eventually decides to fuck off and leave us to our own devices (or does it? The absence of formatting is also part of the narrative). And even this, the act of sharing with you my thoughts feels like I'm part of the fucking story, because isn't people ruminating and debating it the whole point? This is not a book that tells a story. The story sidles in sideways; the story is implied. It's like Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides but with a house instead of depressed teenage girls, aha. This is fiction that has, by virtue of its subject and construction, found a way out of the Matrix and IT IS COMING FOR US NEXT.
IN SHORT, THIS BOOK IS TROLLING ME. Seriously, people who have read this before, how did you deal with it? I glaze over the exhaustive lists of names, for example, but did you follow instructions and refer to the appendices and exhibits every time? I'm on page 139 at the part where Holloway just shot Wax, and Jed has managed to get them away by plunging deeper into the labyrinth, which is relatively early, yeah, but already my head is spinning and you guuuuuuyyyssssfdslkjflksjfal.
( more thoughts on House of Leaves )
If you like this book, you might also like: Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions. Do you like stories about people consumed by their obsessive quest for something liminal? They fall deeper and deeper into that rabbit hole until suddenly their world is upside down. I was reminded very much of Auster's book as I read this. I loved The Book of Illusions, and I am enjoying the hell out of House of Leaves, and I'll tell you more about it once I find my way out of the fucking thing.
