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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375703768
ISBN: 0375703764
Label: Pantheon
Manufacturer: Pantheon
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 709
Publication Date: March 07, 2000
Publisher: Pantheon
Release Date: March 07, 2000
Sales Rank: 1622
Studio: Pantheon
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Editorial Review:
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
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
It deserves more than five stars. For the sake of this review, pretend that a five-star rating on Amazon is some incredibly rare thing that almost never happens, except for the most deserving of all works.
"House of Leaves" is a very difficult book to describe. To take a stab at summarizing the plot in one go, it's about a hedonistic young man with a troubled past working in a tattoo parlor who discovers a blind man's life work: a lengthy academic criticism of a documentary that doesn't ... Read More
Rating: -
Trust me on this when I say "buy it in as close to bad condition as possible." You immediately get a better feel of how the story should be read. That should give you a warning about what to expect.
The format is daunting (the style to which Danielewski subscribes is ergodic literature) and Danielewski for the most part keeps to making your attempts to just READ the novel close to impossible. At numerous times, the author will make the reader circle back (or move forward) any number of ... Read More
Rating: -
I personally thought the novel was great. To me it was more a love story than a horror story. I thought some of the textual layouts were a bit gimmicky, but assumed they had some sort of meaning that I just wasn't getting. The characters of the main novel seemed a bit shallow, in that their personalities weren't very developed, but I found Johnny's concept to be well executed.
I hear all this hype about hype, but I had never heard of any hype surrounding the novel? I practically live in the ... Read More
Rating: -
this book will stretch your mind. it's one you can read several times over
(at least) and discover new layers of the story every time. danielewski is an amazing storyteller. i highly recommend this book.
Rating: -
Rather than overlapping some of the extensive summaries already posted, I'll zoom out and try to offer a helpful observation for the benefit of some of my fellow literati out there ... one that might help you decide to buy this book if you're still undecided. This isn't really a spoiler per se, but for those who dislike even borderline spoilers, stop reading this review now.
----------- OBSERVATION {borderline spoiler alert} -----------------
As best I can tell, the title "House ... Read More
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