Note: I have another definition for TNT (145)—tedious and tiresome. As clever and impressive as this piece of work is I found it a chore to get through. Guess Dave will have to add me to the short list of those who are not fans of this book.

I also enjoyed the varying typographic styles in House of Leaves. One example (and my personal favorite) occurs between pages 270 and 295 during the Navidson and Reston rescue mission. While this is not the first instance of mostly blank pages, this instance successfully illustrates the gravity of the staircase as well as the emptiness and nothingness of the house itself. The upside down text on page 293 is especially striking because it gives that block of text an uncertain and hanging feeling. As Navidson attempts to grab on to the last piece of rope (and it snaps), the snap action is spread out over several pages to where it gets you (the reader) begging to get to the next page.

My question is this: if House of Leaves moves to some other format (for instance, a text on a computer) and loses its book format, will the text still have the same effect on the reader? What effect would changing those elements of type have? Would the “nothingness” still be as powerful if not in a book?

I must say this book reminds me of how thankful I am for Wikipedia. Sometimes I like getting lost in a book and trying to make sense of it, but even if that is the case it is nice to know I have a resource I can go to if I need some help. I definitely appreciate House of Leaves from more of an aesthetic appeal than a technical one. After reading about all of the connections in the book between authors, story lines and metaphors I thought, “Oh, that is really clever.” But the thing that will stay with me most about the book is how it breaks with traditional layout of a novel in so many ways. The context of the book is not manifested in the words written on the pages but in the actual physical book itself. House of Leaves equals Book of Pages.

[btw...where this site is hosted, has a time machine. I looked at Candiluu's comment and it was posted tommorrow at 12:40 in the morning ]

The Navidson Record
Zampano’s comments
Zampano’s story
Truant’s comments
Truant’s story
The editors’ tidbits
What readers make of it all

That’s seven from a quick count without getting the love story, academic discourse, or literary theory into the mix. Yes, just like shifting rooms, the “stories” change up on us just when we think we are getting somewhere. But that’s not entirely true. The stories don’t change as much as they seem to. The entire book seems to follow a labyrinth. We read about the labyrinth under the house, Truant and Lude’s lives are anything but straight (and let’s not even get started on the names – Truant = absent, ludes make people absent….), Zampano navigates through all kinds of academic writing and Danielewski takes the time to place text in different positions so we actually turn the book when Holloway and Navidson turn corners. All the stories seem so unrelated yet are so tightly intertwined we wouldn’t have one without the others.

But how much of that connection is planned? When Truant’s water heater goes out at the same time Karen complains of lacking hot water he openly admits he altered the story to make it seem like a huge coincidence. Later, Truant tells us about the doctors in Seattle, then calls us stupid for believing him. It’s not a far stretch to think Truant may have had his fair share of manipulation before sending the book off.

Come to think of it, Truant spent most of the novel chasing “Thumper,” who if I remember correctly had a white rabbit tattooed someplace near “the happiest place on earth.” He’s following a white rabbit while Navidson is conduction explorations down his own rabbit hole of sorts. (Very Matrixy way to refer to “Alice in Wonderland,” that one.)

My distrust of Truant and his footnotes, when they pertain to the main (can we call Zampano’s a main?) narrative increases when I come across the two open references to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. If I remember correctly, the glosses, which came later, were almost BS, often repeating what the poem said with little to no additional information. Isn’t this Johnny Truant’s role? We see him making up stories to impress girls. Did he make up the girls, too? Zampano seems to be the guest telling the Mariner’s tale and Truant is the glosses running off on his own little errand. Or, maybe I’m mistaken and reading too much into yet another book. Whatever the answer, all the stories work on their own, but work better when viewed in light of the other.

Note: There is one instance of “house” in red rather than blue, although had it not been stricken it may have appeared blue. (But technology allows both colors to exist; so keeping it red was conscious decision.)

It’s difficult to focus on one particular issue with a complex work of literature such as House of Leaves. However, it’s clear that the formal aspects of the novel are the ones that stand out the most (in my opinion in detriment to the story) There are the issues concerning the experiments in form and presentation (changes in font for each character and of color for some texts, design and placement of the texts within the page on certain chapters, etc) and their relation to a possible meaning or effect they were trying to achieve.

Of these formal qualities, the one I found more interesting is the contrast presented when the expeditions inside the hallway took place. Because of the massive amount of footnotes, and having to participate in non-trivial efforts to read the text, the process of reading slows down, and in addition there are times when there’s simply too much information being presented (some of it relevant, some seemingly relevant, and, I suspect, a great deal of it completely irrelevant) all of this collaborating to make the novel dense and obscure at best, or tedious and repetitive in certain moments. Which explains why when one comes to the part when the characters immerse themselves in the hallway in order to explore it (and it’s on these occasions when one finds pages filled with fewer words), that the process of reading accelerates and becomes much lighter, to the point that one wishes that the whole novel would take place inside the ever-changing hallway, but then again if it did there would be no contrast.

There’s also the contrast between the main narrators: Zampano and Johnny, one erudite and perhaps excessively pretentious; the other, more crude and down to earth in his manner of addressing the reader, although in the process he becomes on occasions more… (I guess the word is lyrical, but I’m not sure it fits well). One interrupting the other, reminding me constantly of the unpleasant experience of watching TV with someone very annoying who from time to time changes the channel you’re watching to some other channel, which leaves you a bit frustrated, until you become interested in the new channel, which only means it’s time for switching back to the previous one.

I also notice that there was another narrative going on as well, Zampano was mentioned many times in this second narrative, so it seems like someone was writing a story according to his works, now I’m no literature expert but this was something I assumed but I could be wrong.

The storyline itself is based on mysterious investigations, something you would get out of X-files or the show Supernatural so the term mysterious or enigmatic correlates well with the way that the text has been structured throughout the whole book.

This is the first time that I have ever read a book of this particular nature. Was the writer’s intent for this book to be more interactive and immersive for the reader much like Shelley Jackson has done for Patchwork girl or did he take Derrida’s concept of literary studies and tried to break the socially accepted form of book writing ?

It’s like monkies typing Shakespeare, except all of the words and phrases have been written, and they jumbled everything together to create this book. I’m having a hard time pin pointing one thing in this book to bring up for discussion, but here goes nothing.

My eye/mind immedietly grasped on the 2001:A Space Odyssey and The Shining references. And not just the glaringly obvious monolith discussion and the numerous footnotes. The Navidson Record read much like a Kubric film.

I’m not trying to put words into Danielewski’s mouth, but it seems as though he’s paying homage to Kubrick and his way of telling stories. Kubrick has this innate sense of taking something of literary value (if you notice a lot of his movies are based off of known stories-written and verbal) and transform them into unique visual experiences; he creates a detailed representation of a story by the casual climb of rising action to reach a peak that seems to extend into eternity. One thing I’ve struggled with is finding the climax in a Kubrick film, because there are so many moments that are keep you on your seat in suspense and have you begging for more. That’s how I felt with House of Leaves. You keep on going, expecting some form of a resolution, but you get another plot point and the suspense continues.

To continue, but not to go into depth, the book reads like a film. I can see the camera moving and cuts (think The Shining meets Lolita, both Kubrick films) at appropriate places. The visual of the book having different pieces, the abundance of footnotes, multiple perspectives and all of the randomness that would drive an ADD person insane, that’s what we do with films.