Book Review: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves

i’m not one who has much knowl­edge of lit­er­ary trends in nov­el-writ­ing but House of Leaves strikes me as a book that could very well be the great work of post­mod­ern lit­er­a­ture. which means every­thing and noth­ing. as an exper­i­men­tal nov­el it is a remark­ably well con­struct­ed thing. i had a bit of trou­ble get­ting in to it, but the book teach­es you how to read it as it goes along. at my last count there are three and a half sto­ries all revolv­ing encased with­in each oth­er. start­ing from the core we have The Navid­son Record, a non-fic­tion film and doc­u­men­tary in the true mean­ing of the word, of the Navid­son’s house on Ash Tree Lane that is larg­er on the inside than it is on the out­side. with­in the depths of this house, or per­haps with­in the depths of the souls of the peo­ple that live in the house dwells the shad­owy mino­taur. this sto­ry is the sub­ject of a pseu­do-aca­d­e­m­ic exam­i­na­tion of The Navid­son Record by the blind Zamp no. this per­son is dead. but John­ny Tru­ant who knew Zamp no takes it upon him­self to orga­nize and foot­note this paper, almost at the cost of his san­i­ty. the half sto­ry comes from the edi­tors who take it upon them­selves to pro­vide trans­la­tions for the numer­ous pas­sages in for­eign lan­guages.

the entire work is heav­i­ly foot­not­ed which effec­tive­ly keeps the read­er from becom­ing too engaged in any one sto­ry at a time. also, 4 dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the book exist. in the super-duper de-luxe ver­sion, every occur­rence of house is in blue and the word mino­taur and struck pas­sages are in red. plus, one struck line is in pur­ple and there are braille pas­sages and col­or plates.

as a film stu­dent i was fas­ci­nat­ed with the crit­i­cism of The Navid­son Record. i want to make this film. As for what the book intends to do, i have only slight clues. i need to read it sev­er­al more times and enjoin myself to the mes­sage boards on the book. i sus­pect that the mean­ing will be dif­fer­ent for each per­son. if you like to read, then add this book to your list. i loved it.