Title: House of Leaves
Author: Mark Z. Danielewski
Pages: 709
Grade: B+/A+ (The first grade given for my overall opinion of the book, the second grade for just how damn awesome the idea, format, and well everything about this book is.)
Summary: (From and Condensed by moi...from Amazon)
Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves. Mark Z. Danielewski's first novel has a lot going on: notably the discovery of a pseudoacademic monograph called The Navidson Record, written by a blind man named Zampanò, about a nonexistent documentary film--which itself is about a photojournalist who finds a house that has supernatural, surreal qualities. (The inner dimensions, for example, are measurably larger than the outer ones.) In addition to this Russian-doll layering of narrators, Danielewski packs in poems, scientific lists, collages, Polaroids, appendices of fake correspondence and "various quotes," single lines of prose placed any which way on the page, crossed-out passages, and so on.
My thoughts: This novel is seriously a combination of about three different stories in one. It's first off about Johnny Truant, the tattoo-shop worker whose life gets turned upside down one night in finding a complilation of papers. Those papers are the second story... a tale of a man, Zampano, and what his whole life revolved around, The Navidson Record. And the Navidson Record, portraying the tale of a photojournalist and his family moving into a house in the country to try to rebuild their relationship is the third story. The style amazes me. The work and thought that had to have gone into this. It's an essay...telling the main story...and footnotes telling the tales of the other two stories. And everything just flows. It works. And they are joined by appendices, letters, and photos. And though at times I felt like I was lost and confused...I think it was because I was meant to, and not because I couldn't follow the story. The thing that stuck out to me most, past the fact that this novel could at moments make me feel like darkness might descend upon me, was a review on the back that mentioned this was a 'love story.' I thought it was crazy. No where in the beginning could I see the connection. Yet as I finished The Navidson Record, it suddenly became quite clear that that is at least partially what House of Leaves is. It is a love story. It is a labyrinth. It is everything you are looking for and not at all what you would expect.
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