House of Leaves

[Gilberto]

Just finished House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It's hard to describe. The books challenges your patience and is at times frustrating and incomprehensible (it deliberately makes no sense in places and is designed to misdirect you). You have to commit to finishing this book. The surface story is easy enough to absorb, but you have to follow a lot of wrong turns down a lot of dead ends to get the subtext.

We discussed this a bit on the old forum (before I'd read it), so some of you may know that the author is the brother of recording artist Poe, whose concept album "Haunted" serves almost as a companion piece to the book and is filled with references to it. Good album too; I'm a big fan of Poe.

You could lose yourself in endless discussion and supposition about this book (which is partly the lesson contained in the subtext), but if anyone out there's read this (which I know at least one or two of you have) or if you mean to read it, I'd be curious to know your thoughts.

If you do read it don't get lost in it, but see it through. The book is built to be a trap, but it's also meant to be a journey. There is a way, so press on.

[drivebyluna]

I loved it. After awhile I had to start skimming the stream of consciousness stuff. I also remember that I thought there was a code in the footnotes so I decided to pull out a highlighter to see if I could figure it out but it was pure nonsense.

[Gilberto]

That's what's so funny about the over-analysis the book provokes. He deliberately tries to waste your time with some of that stuff, but in other places there are clues to the real story.

I tried to read everything, but especially when they're exploring the house the footnotes are full of nonsense like examples of architecture and lists of building supplies. One footnote lists photojournalists for about a page and a half then admits afterward that the names were selected at random.

Then there's all the stuff in other languages that he doesn't bother to translate, but instead of worrying over it you find that if you just keep reading the passage is eventually explained somewhere else.

At a pivotal moment in the Navidson Record the action stops mid-sentence and just goes to a chapter about nothing related. It takes up about 80 pages later after you've forgotten where it left off.

For me it's the stuff at the end that gets you, because the book goes on forever after the story's concluded. The endless letters from Johnny Truant's mother really start to make you wonder if you're wasting your time, especially since I don't really like the Johnny Truant stuff at all. But it becomes a tragic deterioration, and her coded letter is really creepy as you slowly decode it. It had a real impact for me because if you've ever known someone who was actually unbalanced, you'd know that her letters are a pretty authentic portrayal of that.

But by the end you're doing it for yourself, vowing not to let the book beat you. It's a fairly interactive experience, like the Neverending Story or something (first time that comparison's ever been made probably).

We could do a show just about this book, but I'd really like to do an ep about the Uncanny, in which we could look at this book as a good example.

[drivebyluna]

I know there's a follow up book of letters between Johnny Truant and his mother. I haven't read it yet though.

[Gilberto]

Apparently a lot of those letters (but not all) are in the 2nd Edition, which is the one I read. It might have been better not to include them in House of Leaves, but there's an argument that their relationship is pretty critical to his arc.