Blown Away/Blows/Jokers in a HOUSE' of Cards
Written: Sep 18 '00 (Updated Mar 22 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: wonder, visual images, symbols, experimental format
Cons: frustrating secondary story, lists, unwieldy format
The Bottom Line: Difficult but rewarding to read, this book demonstrates the ephemeral and evokes the enduring.
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| wordwalker's Full Review: Mark Z. Danielewski and Zampano - House of Leaves |
"There is no Minotaur; he was made of string."1
The central story in HOUSE OF LEAVES gives new meaning to the term, "home movie". A reluctantly domesticated photo-journalist with itchy feet installs cameras in the little HOUSE' he hopes will become a true home now that he has promised the mother of his children to stop globe-trotting. Film clips show that the family is happy after moving into the HOUSE'. But when everybody 'LEAVES for four days, the HOUSE' changes.
A featureless closet appears between the master bedroom and the room the two children share. The closet's walls are black. Ordinary doors open from it into each of the bedrooms; photographs clearly show that the doors were not there before. Nothing triggered the motion sensors in the cameras left operational throughout the HOUSE' during the time everyone was gone. Architectural blueprints do show an empty space left between the bedrooms by former owners who left the HOUSE'. (Every owner 'LEAVES the HOUSE'; these left in need of something "smaller".) The police suggest that the intrusion was the work of "a crazy carpenter".2 This seems funny.
Then the photo-journalist measures the exterior and interior walls of that side of the HOUSE' -- and finds a quarter-inch discrepancy.
A space appears between an interior wall and a recently-built bookcase.
Downstairs a new door manifests; behind it is a freezing-cold, pitch-black labyrinth ....
All my life I have dreamed of the interiors of HOUSE's and other buildings, of beautiful furnishings, hardwood floors shining in lamplight, dark closets, hidden passageways. Once I climbed through a trapdoor in the roof of such a HOUSE' and found the interior of a huge white box enclosing the HOUSE' itself. I had just room enough to stand upright on the roof.
THE NAVIDSON RECORD blew me away.3 Or rather (since the films taken in this HOUSE' do not actually exist even as film), the portion of Zampano's narrative closely concerned with THE NAVIDSON RECORD blew me away, not with horror but with wonder. The great Staircase going down in darkness -- the mountain bike rolling down that immense sloping plane -- Navidson reading the 'LEAVES of the book one after another, each by the light of the flame which consumes the previous leaf -- I have images in my mind that the movie will not be able to ... match (as it were), if somebody makes the movie. Everything a HOUSE', a labyrinth, a spiral staircase, cold and darkness can symbolize is here. It is here already, in what we are directly told of THE NAVIDSON RECORD.
"One should pause, in respect, before the dust upon the labyrinth's threshold."
-- Which of course is why I hope the movie 'LEAVES out the young man's story.
Arguably, it adds verisimilitude. Someone badly damaged finds blind Mr. Zampano's manuscript, THE NAVIDSON RECORD; following upon the many injuries he has already suffered it is Too Much: unable to escape the gaze of the abyss he too unravels/implodes/is blinded, even while seeking to blind/confuse whoever may read what I will call The Truant Report. Yet with a few exceptions (did he travel to Virginia? did he seek the HOUSE' there? [could it have been built near the site of the original Jamestown colony?]) his narrative contributes nothing essential to my understanding of the central story, and therefore 'LEAVES me perennially frustrated, eager for the labyrinth and impatient for its return. I am sorry for Johnny, for the terrible blows he has suffered, for his scars. But he keeps getting in my way.
We don't need verisimilitude, anyway. We have scholarship!
"Within, they will smile, without malice."
Unwilling to simply tell an admittedly complex story, old man Zampano has embellished his description of THE NAVIDSON RECORD with odd arrangements of text and amended it with extensive interpretations. His interpretations. Real people's non-existent interpretations. Non-existent people's interpretations. The reader gets the impression of being practically the last person in the world not to have seen and publicly commented upon the movie! Such commentary has become a virtual (as it were?) cottage industry.
Interpretations, footnotes, fragments, collages, poetry, letters, and artwork form an elaborate and fragile structure, a HOUSE' of cards supporting both the narratives in the novel and the premises of post-modernism. (Scientists' opinions are, curiously, missing.) Some of the lists are long and tiresome, but the celebrity opinions are funny. The misuse of existing books is funny. The reference to "Shirley Jackson's THE HAUNTING" is funny -- and subtle: obviously the films' title has replaced that of Jackson's book in the mind of the writer of the footnote.
Sometimes I think HOUSE OF LEAVES mourns the passing of the very medium it seeks to supplant.
The written equivalent of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, this novel novel by Mark Z. Danielewski is neither so extreme in any direction(!) nor so difficult to handle -- literally or figuratively -- as I expected it to be. If you love THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, THE SHINING (the book!) or the movie POLTERGEIST, go through THE NAVIDSON RECORD and see if you go through the roof -- and clear outside the box!4 If you appreciate A. S. Byatt's POSSESSION or the poetry of Sylvia Plath, contemplate an Appendix or three as well as "Navy's Navel". If you have time and patience enough, play Truant with Johnny.
If the review's format 'LEAVES you cold, then indeed, "This is not for you."
1 All isolated lines quoted are from an unpublished poem by the reviewer.
2 Consider C. S. Lewis' observation concerning "the man who says he is a fried egg".
3 The names "Navidson", "Karen" and "Holloway" are meaningful.
4 See also ARCHITECTURE OF FEAR, edited by Kathryn Cramer and Peter D. Pautz; WALLS OF FEAR, edited by Kathryn Cramer alone; NARROW HOUSES, edited by Peter Crowther; and HOUSE SHUDDERS, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Charles C. Waugh.
Recommended:
Yes
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