Project Insomnia

Project Insomnia is many things, but in this context it is simply a "braindump" of whatever I happen to be thinking/reading/watching/doing at the moment. Parental guidance suggested.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

House of Leaves - an incomplete review

I'd never heard of House of Leaves, but after this XKCD cartoon and a forum comment explaining it, I decided it sounded intriguing and found a copy at Borders. It was a larger book than I'd somehow expected -- over 700 pages in trade paperback, including numerous (very numerous) footnotes, asides, introductions and appendices. The book is multi-layered tale of a drug-addicted tattoo parlor assistant who finds an unpublished dissertation at the home of a dead man. The dissertation is a book-length review of a movie, "The Navidson Record". From the narrator's words it's clear that this movie never existed, so it's unclear why the old man wrote so much about a nonexistent film. The review itself is quite scholarly in tone, with numerous footnotes, quotes and references. It's then further footnoted and edited by the narrator, whose subscripted asides quickly develop into an entirely different story. Or is it so different?

In the end, or after least at page 200 or so, it doesn't matter. The narrator is plainly losing his mind as he edits and annotates the review, and the author's M.O. of constant footnotes and backreferences quickly grows tiring. At first I admired the denseness of this book, comparing it to GEB in terms of the level of thought and concentration required to grasp the overall narration. I eventually realized that unlike GEB, it's not sublime; it's just pretentious. I gave up in disgust around page 200 and am now offering the book to the first person who asks.

I realize this quickie review doesn't really do the book justice, either as a legitimate review of the author's obvious effort or as a clear enumeration of why it annoyed me so much that I committed the usually-unpardonable sin of discarding it before finishing. The Publisher's Weekly review on Amazon might help:
Danielewski's eccentric and sometimes brilliant debut novel is really two novels, hooked together by the Nabokovian trick of running one narrative in footnotes to the other. One-the horror story-is a tour-de-force. Zampano, a blind Angelino recluse, dies, leaving behind the notes to a manuscript that's an account of a film called The Navidson Report. In the Report, Pulitzer Prize-winning news photographer Will Navidson and his girlfriend move with their two children to a house in an unnamed Virginia town in an attempt to save their relationship. One day, Will discovers that the interior of the house measures more than its exterior. More ominously, a closet appears, then a hallway. Out of this intellectual paradox, Danielewski constructs a viscerally frightening experience. Will contacts a number of people, including explorer Holloway Roberts, who mounts an expedition with his two-man crew. They discover a vast stairway and countless halls. The whole structure occasionally groans, and the space reconfigures, driving Holloway into a murderous frenzy. The story of the house is stitched together from disparate accounts, until the experience becomes somewhat like stumbling into Borges's Library of Babel. This potentially cumbersome device actually enhances the horror of the tale, rather than distracting from it. Less successful, however, is the second story unfolding in footnotes, that of the manuscript's editor, (and the novel's narrator), Johnny Truant. Johnny, who discovered Zampano's body and took his papers, works in a tattoo parlor. He tracks down and beds most of the women who assisted Zampano in preparing his manuscript. But soon Johnny is crippled by panic attacks, bringing him close to psychosis. In the Truant sections, Danielewski attempts an Infinite Jest-like feat of ventriloquism, but where Wallace is a master of voices, Danielewski is not. His strength is parodying a certain academic tone and harnessing that to pop culture tropes. Nevertheless, the novel is a surreal palimpsest of terror and erudition, surely destined for cult status. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


It's a best-seller. Obviously some people get more out of it than I did. That's why I'm offering it free to the first person who asks. You pay shipping or arrange to meet.
|| Andrew, 9:55 AM || ||

"Project Insomnia" and "project-insomnia.com" ™ & SM; site contents © Andrew Rich except where noted.