asandwich

Quod evenit in labyrintho properantibus:
ipsa illos velocitas inplicat.

Good grief Danielewski, what have you done to me? There was a time when I may, on occasion, have been capable of at least some form of coherent thought and possibly even formulated constructive ideas. But then I picked up this book.

This bloody book.

This is my sixth (sixth!) attempt at putting thoughts into words about House of Leaves and, hey, who knows? This one may even turn out to be vaguely readable. Stranger things have (probably) happened.


**I'll start by making it clear that I'm not going to dwell too much on what I think this book is about. Not in this space, at least. This is a book that everyone will interpret differently and I'm not about to attempt to influence you into reading it in a certain way, because that would totally defeat the purpose. Feel free to ask, by all means; but I went into House of Leaves with zero knowledge of what lay ahead of me, and I'd recommend anyone contemplating reading it do the same. For this reason, I'll probably divide everything up into sections and use a lot of spoiler tags. Even if they don't necessarily include spoilers.**


A brief synopsis (which doesn't really contain spoilers, but I'm erring on the side of caution here):

On the face of it, House of Leaves appears to be akin to one of those "found footage" films that became all the rage in the late 1990's. The footage, known as "The Navidson Record", documents a family's (photojournalist Will “Navy” Navidson and his ex-fashion model partner, Karen Green, plus their kids Chad and Daisy) arrival at their new home. Here, they quickly discover that the house comes equipped with features not listed by the agent - like ever-changing internal dimensions and the sudden appearance of a door that leads into a vast, dark, subterranean labyrinth. Both of which I'd consider more interesting than a downstairs cloakroom or an outdoors hot-tub, but maybe that's just me. The majority of "The Navidson Record" depicts a series of increasingly disastrous explorations made into the depths of the labyrinth, and how Navy's growing obsession with the secrets that lie beneath the house begin to erode away his relationship with Karen.

With me so far? Good, because now it gets a little bit more confusing.

To our knowledge, no copies of the footage still exist. The account of "The Navidson Record " that we're reading in House of Leaves is written by Zampanò, an elderly blind man who spent the last decade of his life compiling all the information he could find on the incident in order to publish a definitive analysis of the events. Zampanò dies before his work is finished, and the vast majority of his scattered, disorganised notes for the book are left inside a box in his apartment.

Enter Johnny Truant, professional slacker. Truant discovers Zampanò's notes and, intrigued by the story, makes the decision to not only work on putting the old man's notes into order, but also attempt to finish what he started.

So, in effect, House of Leaves is a second-hand description of the events of "The Navidson Record", as told by Zampanò, with a third-hand commentary on all of the above by Truant, as he attempts to make some kind of sense of it all. Oh, and with occasional extra footnotes by a fourth, unknown "editor" of the final publication.

And you can, if you so wish, choose to read the book like this, from start to finish. And, on a personal note, if you do then I totally envy you.

Because I could not.

This book isn’t just about a labyrinth; it is a labyrinth. Which path you choose to take to the exit is entirely up to you - the simplest being to follow the “Way Out” signs until you reach the end of the book, and you’re done. But, along the way, there are other paths - unmarked and unlit - which offer you a completely different way through. Or do they? If you choose to venture ever deeper into the labyrinth, will you be able to find your way back? Will there ever even be an exit?


I hate this book.


Down the rabbit hole (enter at your peril):

I managed to get to somewhere around the vicinity of page seventy before I stopped. Something just didn't sit quite right with me. Discrepancies in the footnotes began to suggest that I was missing something crucial, and I became convinced that there was more to the relationship between Zampanò and Truant than first meets the eye. So I started again, but this time I started making notes of anything that seemed like it could be a clue to unravelling the mystery.

I left the path.

If only I’d known where this would lead me...

You see, House of Leaves is, on a purely technical level, absolutely astounding. Just leafing through the pages reveals the broader strokes of this achievement, with all the crazy formatting and orientation of the text mimicking the tone - and even the action - on the page. But it doesn’t stop there, oh nonono. Look even closer and you’ll start to see clues and patterns everywhere: text colour; font; musical notation; repetition of themes and motifs (but particularly those of either a labyrinthine or nautical nature); grammatical errors; typographical errors; dates; names; references to Dante; to Fellini; letters; poems; pictures; the ground-air emergency code… it goes on.


I love this book.


The rabbit hole, continued:

I began making notes on literally anything that could possibly mean something - my reasoning being that Danielewski would not have made any mistakes in a book this utterly reliant on its own technical proficiency without those mistakes being there for a reason (I absolutely refused to consider the fact that he could have just as easily been fucking around with people’s heads, although I acknowledge that it may be equally as likely). My OCD-like desire - no, more than desire; a need - to discover what lay at the heart of this labyrinth drove me frantically onward, flipping backwards and forwards through the book; back and forth from chapter to appendix and back to chapter, again and again, over and over. More notes.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it: in the shower; at breakfast; in the car; at work; at lunch; in bed; in my dreams. In fact, the only other book in recent memory that has literally infested my thoughts and given me such vivid dreams anywhere close to this was Catherynne M. Valente’s The Labyrinth - which probably says a lot more about me than I’d actually care to admit.

The irony that I’d become a living parody of a character from the book I was puzzling over was not lost on me.

It’s been nearly two months since I first opened House of Leaves, and it’s still here, sat on my desk. I’ve read it through probably close to a dozen times by now and, although the urge to continue picking it up and “nerding out” all over it is still there, I think I have my obsessional urges under control, for the time being.

Would I recommend this to you? I really don’t know; I think it depends on how willing you are to invest yourself in it. I can certainly see how many people would regard this book as a load of overblown, self-important pretentiousness. “Weird for the sake of weird.” I suspected as much myself, before I got to that point - somewhere around page seventy - where I stopped following those exit signs and got utterly and irretrievably lost within the depths of the maze.

I guess the most haunting thing about this book is what it tells you about yourself.


This book.


I know I said I’m not going to discuss what I think this book is about, and I’m not; not really. But if you’re wondering if all that work - the obsessiveness and the notes and the thoughts and the endless cross-referencing - paid off, then I’ll tell you this:

I have no idea.

Wait; that’s not fair. I mean, I think it did. At least, I know it did for me. I have theories. Yes, that’s a plural. More than one theory. Several, actually.

And no, none of them have anything to do with “The Navidson Record”, which I’m almost entirely certain never existed in the first place.

I never did find the exit, then. That’s okay. Perhaps I’ll pick the book up again just now and start carefully picking my way through the labyrinth again.

Maybe I’ll meet you in there, someday.

Maybe.