re:mote voices

Title: House Of Leaves
Author: Mark Z Danielewski
Publisher:Doubleday

House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielwiski - One night Johnny Truant gets a call from his friend. The old man upstairs has died, and he has found something he thinks Johnny will be interested in. This is how Johnny inherits Zampano's trunk - a box filled with papers, notes, scribblings, which together form the definitive critique/document on The Navidson Record.


Will Navidson was a prize winning photo-journalist, but being constantly away put a strain on his relationship with his family. So he moves to Virginia with his girlfriend and two kids, determined that they will become the perfect family. He can't let his profession go though, so he decides to make a film about his family, installing cameras around the house .


However the film that was finally released as The Navidson Record was about the house that they had moved into. It started one weekend, they had been away, and when they came back there was a doorway between the parents and kids room, which wasn't there before. bemused by this addition Navidson calls in his brother and an old friend. But before an answer can be found to this doorway's appearance another doorway appears. This time leading into an impossible hallway - leading to an impossibly large maze of cold, dark and unstable corridors and rooms.


Truant doesn't know what to make of the book which tells all about the film and analyses everything about it - especially when he can't find anyone that has even seen or heard of this film. Initially it is a curiosity, something he picks at now and then. Eventually he is sucked in though, and strange things start happening - any time he finds himself in a dark place he starts to smell something really bad, and get the feeling that there is something in the darkness which is coming for him. A sensation which seems to mirror that described by those who explored the extra spaces of that house .


House of Leaves is a layered work, which is mad and absorbing. Zampano as author of the book is the character perhaps least present, as he is concentrating on the film and the events from the house . The book is presented as non-fiction, along with accompanying foot notes and appendices. It is within these footnotes that we encounter the tangents of Truant - Zampano's notes are fleshed out by Truant, which are in turn fleshed out by the editors of the published volume. Within these notes Truant gains a tendency to start talking about himself, and sometimes about the things he has learnt about Zampano while researching the found material. At times taking up pages with his secondary narrative.


House of Leaves is wilfully difficult, forcing the reader to work, to experience. Layering up these notes, sending you off to read 40 pages of letters in an appendix. Building us up to a point of real tension with the events in the house , only to follow that with a discussion of the various articles to have commented on a gesture or comment. This is part of the experimental nature of House of Leaves, as are the visual and narrative constructions. The fonts used for the various notes are different to indicate whether they are by Zampano, Truant, or the Editors. Every time the word house appears it is a different shade/font from the rest of the text (except for one occurrence in my copy!), even if the word house appears in a different language; apparently earlier editions even had the word house printed in blue. By the same token apparently earlier editions also had sections of text which were struck through printed in red text. As well as an actual Braille plate for a quote which appears in Braille. To indicate the nature of the material Truant is dealing with, there are omissions, pages missing, damaged, erased, which he has put into the book in whatever condition he can.


Appropriately the sections exploring these extra spaces in the house are where the narrative becomes most challenging. Reflecting the anxiety of the explorers, creating a certain unease in the reader. And at it's worst threatening to lose the reader altogether - switching to columns, referring to irrelevant or non-existent footnotes, layering in lists, backwards or upside down text, pages with only a word or two on them at all. It was this kind of presentation which attracted me to House of Leaves in the first place. I found it on the shelves of a book shop - an oversized slab of a book, 700 pages, which as you flick through you can just see how messed up the book is, how much effort has gone into it's presentation and construction.


Initially I wasn't sure what to make of House of Leaves. Having come across it I did some research, even found an extract from the chapter online. All of which continued to pique my interest. Starting to read it, I suspected that it might be a slog, the density of detail, the way it gets bogged down in the analysis of every frame of film. But quickly I found myself sucked in, finding myself sitting till 4am reading it. House of Leaves is so many things; a certain perverse humour exists in the pedantic and at time self-involved and inconsistent discussions; Truant's tangents are just so different from the core, tales of drugs, sex and fucking up; then there is the slow unravelling story that is at the heart of it all, which I at least, found to be compelling and unsettling. House of Leaves I suspect is a unique work, I've certainly never seen or read any thing like it and I found it undeniably memorable.

# posted by remotepush @ 7:01 pm