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March 15th, 2006 by Cory Mailliard (Permalink)
Director: Mark Danielewski Year: 2000 Add Comments |
For the most part, postmodernism has been an insufferable trend in literature, rarely amounting to anything more than a cheap narrative device. But House of Leaves, first-time author Mark Z Danielewski’s unapologetically postmodern novel, manages to make it mean something. Ostensibly a horror story, House of Leaves manages to twist itself into a contemplation of the responsibility of the documentarian.
Johnny Truant, a drug addicted tattoo artist, finds a trunk filled with fragments of a manuscript in the apartment of his recently deceased neighbor, Zampano. Zampano was writing about The Navidson Record, a documentary film by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Will Navidson, which examined the amorphous dimensions of Navidson’s new home. Navidson measures the inside of his home only to find that it is larger than the outside. Soon, an ominous hallway appears in the living room, and the bulk of the documentary follows the exploration of the ever-changing labyrinth of hallways and staircases found within. Johnny collects, arranges, and edits the fragments of Zampano’s text, adding his own lengthy footnotes detailing his sexual escapades and fading sanity. This patchwork manuscript was then sent to a group of unnamed editors, the result being House of Leaves. So, we have a story that has been filtered through three disparate points of view.
House of Leaves provides its would-be documentarians with a subject that refuses to be passively recorded. Particularly with Navidson, it shatters the idea of the photographer being detached from his subject—an idea that is already haunting Navidson, as seen in his obsession with his prize-winning photograph, and his relationship with another of his subjects. If Danielewski rejects the notion of detachment, he finds the failure to represent the truth unacceptable. In a photograph found inside the front cover (which would have been a throw-away graphic in any other novel) we find a note from Johnny or Zampano which toys with the notion of changing the narrative. We are meant to believe—I think—that Zampano was destroyed by his attempt to add a monster to Navidson’s labyrinth. And Johnny, when he attempts to add a subplot concerning a broken water heater at the Navidson house, finds that his own water heater is suddenly broken.
The text of the novel has imbedded codes throughout, and as the darkened labyrinth becomes more complex, the format of the text and footnotes becomes more complex, mirroring the confusion, and at times, the actions of the characters.
Mark Z Danielewski has written a complex, multi-layered novel that is strange, frightening, and always interesting. Indeed, there is more to this novel than can be discussed in a short recommendation. It should also be noted, the rumor mill is touting a film adaptation of this.
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April 6th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
This novel was extremely entertaining (particularly for a transcendentalist/postmodern novel), but it was not free of pretention. While many of the little “bits” as they might be called, did act as symbols and motifs, others were just exercises in souless style, detracting much more than adding.
Still, a worthy read.