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House of Leaves |  | Author: Mark Z. Danielewski
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy Used: $8.38
as of 9/5/2010 02:55 MDT details
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Rating:  639 reviews
Sales Rank: 2174
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2nd
Pages: 709
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.3
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 7.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 0375703764
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375703768
ASIN: 0375703764
Publication Date: March 7, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| • | ISBN13: 9780375703768 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
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Product Description
This book, Mark Z. Danielewski's experimental first novel, has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, which aims to recogise and reward new writing across fiction and non-fiction. A special report featuring reviews, extracts and online resources for all the titles, plus talkboards and an online poll can be found[online].
Amazon.com Review
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.
Now that we've reached the post-postmodern era, presumably there's nobody left who needs liberating from the strictures of conventional fiction. So apart from its narrative high jinks, what does House of Leaves have to offer? According to Johnny Truant, the tattoo-shop apprentice who discovers Zampanò's work, once you read The Navidson Record, For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. We'll have to take his word for it, however. As it's presented here, the description of the spooky film isn't continuous enough to have much scare power. Instead, we're pulled back into Johnny Truant's world through his footnotes, which he uses to discharge everything in his head, including the discovery of the manuscript, his encounters with people who knew Zampanò, and his own battles with drugs, sex, ennui, and a vague evil force. If The Navidson Record is a mad professor lecturing on the supernatural with rational-seeming conviction, Truant's footnotes are the manic student in the back of the auditorium, wigged out and furiously scribbling whoa-dude notes about life.
Despite his flaws, Truant is an appealingly earnest amateur editor--finding translators, tracking down sources, pointing out incongruities. Danielewski takes an academic's--or ex-academic's--glee in footnotes (the similarity to David Foster Wallace is almost too obvious to mention), as well as other bogus ivory-tower trappings such as interviews with celebrity scholars like Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom. And he stuffs highbrow and pop-culture references (and parodies) into the novel with the enthusiasm of an anarchist filling a pipe bomb with bits of junk metal. House of Leaves may not be the prettiest or most coherent collection, but if you're trying to blow stuff up, who cares? --John Ponyicsanyi
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 639
 This is the greatest work of modern fiction August 23, 2010
Joe Novak
I cannot recommend this book enough for ... well, anyone who likes to read. It truly is progressive fiction at its finest.
The level of craftsmanship and depth that is put into the characters, plot, and narration is nothing short of masterful. My second read-through was more enjoyable than my first, and I'm sure my third will follow suit.
WARNING: You'll never be satisfied by traditional fiction again. Read at your own risk.
Obviously Not For Everyone August 12, 2010
Jay-Z Fetish (Missoula, MT)
I'll start out by saying that I loved the book. Not all of it, but the parts I did love I felt were great enough to push this to a 5-star review. Explaining it is kind of complicated.
The story of the book is that a young man finds a manuscript of an analysis of a documentary in an elderly man's apartment after the man had passed away. It contains not only the analysis of "The Navidson Record", but the author's notes, and the notes of the young man who found it. Frankly, I found his notes (which often wandered into pages and pages of stories about how his life has gone crazy since finding it) to be the weakest part, so I focused on the analysis--the manuscript he found in the apartment. The documentary is the real focus of the story, and the manuscript is a very unique way of telling that story. I can't think of a better way to have gotten across the weird creepiness of what the documentary should be without doing it this way.
Occasionally, yes, the formatting gets weird for the sake of being weird, but a couple places it really works: in one of the most quickly paced sequences, each page only has a couple sentences. As the scene gains momentum, there are fewer and fewer words on each page, and you find yourself whipping through the pages faster and faster, and it really adds to the tension. You're not just sitting there leisurely reading an intense scene, you're moving as frantically as the characters.
The idea of the Navidson Record is fascinating, and a wonderful idea. However, you have to work for it a little, and like the best horror movies, most of the actual horror plays upon the fact that the unknown is far scarier than anything you could ever see. Fortunately, the part I found to be most hindering to enjoyment of the book (Johnny's notes) are easily skipped. I'd say that if your interest is piqued by the idea of a house that's larger on the inside than it is on the outside, then you should give it a shot.
Complicated July 11, 2010
Thompson
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Danielewski has, in my opinion, created a fantastic book that engages the reader in ways most contemporary books do not. So may questions are raised by the book, and so few are answered. The house itself is a mystery that is never fully solved, as are the stories of Zampano and Johnny, leaving the reader questioning even their own lives. When I was reading the story, it influenced my dreams, the ever changing landscape of the house mirrored in an ever changing dreamscape. When I finished reading, I felt like I had finally made it out of that labyrinth. And, like Navidson himself, I find myself wanting to go back into the labyrinth, to better understand it, to contemplate what its existence means.
If your grasp of reality is tenuous, House of Leaves may very well push you over the edge. But for some people, that's the best part. Just be sure to bring a spool of thread, so you can find your way back.
House of Leaves July 11, 2010
lucyj33
Bought this as a gift for my nephew, but I read it first. Book was in great condition.
 A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia July 9, 2010
Dr. Joseph Suglia
3 out of 17 found this review helpful
A Critical Introduction to HOUSE OF LEAVES by Mark Z. Danielewski
by Dr. Joseph Suglia
Of the many attempts to communalize literature, none is more dangerous than the sway of the current ideology: the consensus, and consciousness, that writing has nothing to do with writing. You will hear readers talk about "plot" (in other words, life). You will hear them talk about the "author." But writing? Writing has nothing to do with writing. No one cares whether a book is well-written anymore.
* * * * *
Mark Z. Danielewski is not very much interested in language. He cares more about graphics than he does about glyphs. No words live in his House of Leaves. It is a house of pictures, not of words. It is a house in which words only exist as blocks of physical imagery.
Allow me to cite a few not unrepresentative sentences from House of Leaves:
1.) "A hooker in silver slippers quickened by me" [296]. Danielewski, scholar, thinks that "to quicken" means "to move quickly."
2.) "Regrettably, Tom fails to stop at a sip" [320]. I convulse in agony every time I read this sentence.
3.) "Strangely then, the best argument for fact is the absolute unaffordability of fiction" [149]. The immediate context suggests that "untenability" or "improbability" is the word, not "unaffordability" (the "fact" or the factuality of the Navidson Record is demonstrated by overwhelming evidence: IRS records, credit-card statements, etc.). It may be the case that Mark Z. Danielewski is simply using the wrong word. Otherwise, he is being pretentious - that is, he is pretending to know things of which he knows nothing.
It is impossible to escape the impression that Mark Z. Danielewski does not want to be read. Noli me legere = "Do not read me." The House of Leaves is a book at which to be looked, not one that is to be read. Its sprawling typographies and fonts distract the reader from the impoverished prose.
Words are reduced to images, to pictures.
* * * * *
Such infantile reductions issue from something far worse than the coronation of the idiot: literary conformism. Even stronger writers, these days, morosely submit to the prevailing consolidation of a single "literary style." A style that, of course, is no style at all. And these same writers, listlessly and lifelessly, affirm in reciprocal agreement that the construction of a well-wrought sentence isn't something worth spending time on. Or blood.
How self-complacent American writers have become! The same country that produced Herman Melville, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow has given birth to Mark Z. Danielewski. Nothing is more hostile to art than a culture of complacency.
There was, I'm sure, something very refreshing about Charles Bukowski in the 1970s, when the vestiges of a literary academism still existed. Mr. Bukowski, I am assuming, would be dismayed to uncover the kindergarten of illiterate "literati" to which he has illegitimately given birth. His dauphin, Mark Z. Danielewski.
Weaker students of literature may feel invigorated by the Church of Literary Infantilism, yet even they know that the clergy engenders nothing sacred or profane. This explains their virulent defensiveness when anyone, such as myself, dares to write well or explore another writer's engagement with language. "Writing doesn't matter," you see. They have never luxuriated in the waters of language; they have never inhabited a world of words. Words don't interest them; people do. And literary discussions have degenerated to the level of a bluestockinged Tupperware party. If you like the main character, the book is "good." If a book is warm and friendly, that book is "good." If a book reassures you that you are not a slavering imbecile--that is to say, if you can write better than the book's "author"--that book is "good." If a book disquiets you or provokes any kind of thought whatsoever, that book is "bad." If a book has an unsympathetic main character, that book is "bad." If a book is difficult to understand, that book is "bad," and so forth and so on. Whatever exceeds the low, low, low standards of the average readership, in a word, is blithely dismissed as "bad."
Things grow even more frightening when we consider the following: These unlettered readers are quickly transforming into writers. That would be fine if they knew how to write. And if the movements of language were valued, culturally and humanly, their noxious spewings would find no foothold. The literature of challenge has been supplanted by the litter of the mob, with all of its mumbling solecisms and false enchantments. The problem with mobs, let us remind ourselves, is that they efface distinctions. They do everything in their power to make the distinguished undistinguished. And so instead of James Joyce, we have bar-brawling muscleheads (e.g. Chuck Palahniuk), simian troglodytes (e.g. Henry Rollins), and graphic designers / typographists (e.g. Mark Z. Danielewski).
Instead of poeticisms, we have grunts. We have pictures. We have graphic design and cinema.
* * * * *
America is responsible for the production of more linguistic *** **** than any other country in the world. There is absolutely nothing surprising about this statement. After all, America is the only country that celebrates stupidity as a virtue. And Americans browse the internet more often than they read in a sustained manner. How could things be otherwise?
At the poisonous end of the democratization-process, which is indistinguishable from the process of vulgarization, every ******* on the street sees himself as an "author." His brother, his grandmother, and his step-uncle: they, too, regard themselves as "authors." After all, they think--inasmuch as they are capable of thinking--"Writing has nothing to do with writing. If Mark Z. Danielewski can be published, so can I!" (Yes, their desire is "to be published," as if their lives would be inscribed on the page, disseminated, filmed, and thus rendered meaningful.) In an age of all-englobing and infinitely multiplying cybernetic technologies, no one can stop these stammering imbeciles from mass-replicating their infantile scribbles, but let us not deceive ourselves: If a "writer" is simply one who writes, then they are writers; however, one should reserve the word "author" only for those who are profoundly committed to the craft of verbal composition.
* * * * *
Judging from a purely technical point of view, the House of Leaves is consistently faulty, fraught with excruciating Hallmark banalities and galling linguistic errors. Hipster Mark Z. Danielewski is seemingly incapable of composing a single striking or insightful sentence. It astonishes me that anyone ever considered his tinker-toy bromides to be publishable. The House of Leaves is a house that is neither well-appointed nor ill-appointed. It is simply not appointed at all.
* * * * *
The impetuses that motivate this tsunami of "literary" vomit are the following ideological assumptions: 1.) The fallacy that everyone is entitled to be an author (this is a particularly nasty perversion of the democratic principle), and 2.) the fallacy that good writing does not matter. American letters have been reduced to the gibbering and jabbering of semiliterate simpletons, driveling half-wits, and slack-jawed middlebrows.
When you live in a culture of complacency, a culture of appeasement, a hypocritical culture that assures you that you write well even if you don't, there is only one way out. There is nothing for the strong and serious student of literature to do but to write for himself, to write for herself, for his or her own sake.
Dr. Joseph Suglia
Showing reviews 1-5 of 639
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