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House Of Leaves Book Review Full Color Remastered✅️ Tom Bryan ✅️

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House of Leaves: The Remastered Full-Color Edition Paperback – March 7, 2000

by Mark Z. Danielewski (Author)

4.6 11,371 ratings

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THE MIND-BENDING CULT CLASSIC ABOUT A HOUSE THAT’S LARGER ON THE INSIDE THAN ON THE OUTSIDE • A masterpiece of horror and an astonishingly immersive, maze-like reading experience that redefines the boundaries of a novel.

''Simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distressingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent—it renders most other fiction meaningless." —Bret Easton Ellis, bestselling author of American Psycho

“This demonically brilliant book is impossible to ignore.” —Jonathan Lethem, award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn

Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth—musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies—the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.

Now made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices, the story remains unchanged. Similarly, the cultural fascination with House of Leaves remains as fervent and as imaginative as ever. The novel has gone on to inspire doctorate-level courses and masters theses, cultural phenomena like the online urban legend of “the backrooms,” and incredible works of art in entirely unrealted mediums from music to video games.

Neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of the impossibility of their new home, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story—of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

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

From Publishers Weekly

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.

From Library Journal

When Johnny Truant attempts to organize the many fragments of a strange manuscript by a dead blind man, it gains possession of his very soul. The manuscript is a complex commentary on a documentary film (The Navidson Record) about a house that defies all the laws of physics. Navidson's exploration of a seemingly endless, totally dark, and constantly changing labyrinth in the house becomes an examination of truth, perception, and darkness itself. The book interweaves the manuscript with over 400 footnotes to works real and imagined, thus illuminating both the text and Truant's mental disintegration. First novelist Danielewski employs avant-garde page layouts that are occasionally a bit too clever but are generally highly effective. Although it may be consigned to the "horror" genre, this novel is also a psychological thriller, a quest, a literary hoax, a dark comedy, and a work of cultural criticism. It is simultaneously a highly literary work and an absolute hoot. This powerful and extremely original novel is strongly recommended for all public and academic libraries.
-Jim Dwyer, California State Univ. Lib., Chico
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

This stunning first effort is destined for fast-track cult status. A photographer decides to create a film document of his family moving into a new home. The project runs smoothly until the interior dimensions of the house turn out to be larger than the exterior. Over time, a maze of passageways appear and disappear, perhaps inhabited by an unseen malevolent creature. Equipped with cameras, a team tries to explore the shifting labyrinth, but they are forced out after the expedition proves deadly. But what they have managed to film is a critical success, generating thousands of pages of analysis. Years later, a trunk of these documents fall into the hands of a young man after the curious death of a neighbor. He finds that the dimensions of his own life may not be as fixed as he once imagined, and that he might also be pursued by an unknown entity. This work is a kaleidoscopically layered and deconstructed H. P. Lovecraft-style horror story. It hums and resonates with wonder, dread, and insight. Eric Robbins

Review

“Any hope or fear that the experimental novel was an aberration of the twentieth century is dashed by the appearance of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the first major experimental novel of the new millennium. And it’s a monster. Dazzling.”
—The Washington Post Book World

“An intricate, erudite, and deeply frightening book.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“A great novel. A phenomenal debut. Thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy, distressingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent—it renders most other fiction meaningless. One can imagine Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, Stephen King, and David Foster Wallace bowing at Danielewski’s feet, choking with astonishment, surprise, laughter, awe.”
—Bret Easton Ellis

“[Its] chills spark vertigo, its erudition brings on dislocating giddiness . . . House of Leaves is dizzying in every respect.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Stunning . . . What could have been a perfectly entertaining bit of literary
horror is instead an assault on the nature of story.”
—Spin

“This demonically brilliant book is impossible to ignore, put down, or persuasively conclude reading. In fact, when you purchase your copy you may reach a certain page and find me there, reduced in size like Vincent Price in The Fly, still trapped in the web of its malicious, beautiful pages.”
—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

“[A] tour de force first novel. [It] can keep you up at nights and make you never look at a closet in quite the same way again . . . Staggeringly good fun.”
—Chicago Sun-Times

“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.”
—The New York Times

“If you can imagine that Peter Pan’s enemy is not Captain Hook but Neverland itself, or that the whale that swallows Jonah is Moby-Dick, you’ll begin to appreciate what this book is about. Anticipate it with dread, seize, and understand. A riveting reading experience.”
—Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Grabs hold and won’t let go . . . The reader races through the pages exactly as her mind races to find out what happens next.”
—The Village Voice

“Like Melville’s Moby-Dick, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Danielewski’s House of Leaves is a grandly ambitious multi-layered work that simply knocks your socks off with its vast scope, erudition, formal inventiveness, and sheer storytelling skills.” —San Diego Union-Tribune

From the Publisher

"This demonically brilliant book is impossible to ignore, put down, or persuasively conclude reading. In fact, when you purchase your copy you may reach a certain page and find me there, reduced in size like Vincent Price in The Fly, still trapped in the web of its malicious, beautiful pages."
-- Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

"An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel -- ten years in the making -- that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted house tale...Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography...The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of post-modernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year."
-- Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"The novel is a surreal palimpsest of terror and erudition, surely destined for cult status....The story of the house is stitched together from disparate accounts, until the experience becomes somewhat like stumbling into Borges's Library of Babel...The horror story -- is a tour de force."
--Publishers Weekly

From the Inside Flap

Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.

Now, for the first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices.

The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

From the Back Cover

Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children.
Now, for the first time, this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and newly added second and third appendices.
The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.

About the Author

Mark Z. Danielewski was born in 1966. House of Leaves is his first novel.

Print length

736 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Pantheon
Publication date

March 7, 2000
Dimensions

7 x 1.18 x 9.24 inches
ISBN-10

0375703764
ISBN-13

978-0375703768
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon; 2nd edition (March 7, 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 736 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375703764
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375703768
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 1.18 x 9.24 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #423 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #10 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #83 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- #113 in Suspense Thrillers

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Mark Z. Danielewski

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Mark Z. Danielewski was born in New York City and lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of the award-winning and bestselling novel House of Leaves, National Book Award finalist Only Revolutions, and the novella The Fifty Year Sword, which was performed on Halloween three years in a row at REDCAT.

His books have been translated into multiple languages, and his work has been the focus of university classes and literary events. In 2015, Danielewski's THROWN, a reflection on Matthew Barney's CREMASTER 2, was displayed at the Guggenheim Museum during its Storylines exhibition.

Between 2015-2017, Pantheon released five volumes of The Familiar, each an 880-page installment about a 12-year-old girl who finds a kitten and sets off a chain reaction with global consequences. With the release of the series, the New York Times declared Danielewski "America's foremost literary Magus."

His latest release, The Little Blue Kite, will be out on November 5, 2019, accompanied by a US tour.

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David

Do the words meta, post-modern, or experimental make you cringe when used to describe books? Then turn back now.

Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2016

Verified Purchase

Do the words meta, post-modern, or experimental make you cringe when used to describe books? Then turn back now. I feel the need to say that up front because many people seem to go into this book expecting a horror novel and wind up wasting their money. Just take a look at the genres that goodreads lists this as. Horror, fiction, fantasy, and mystery. With inapt labels like that, it's easy to see how people could get the wrong idea.

This is not a horror novel, nor is it a mystery novel or a fantasy novel. This book is, among many other things, a personal story about the author's parents presented as experimental literary fiction that's thinly veiled as a horror novel. Confused? Good, stay that way for now, and don't think too hard about what I just said. I'm not that into horror novels, and I generally like post-modern and experimental stuff, and I knew what I was getting into when I bought this. Know what you're getting into, that's all I'm trying to say.

Here's the basic concept as clear and concise as I can tell it. There are essentially three narrators that will be addressing you, the reader.

1) Zampano, an old blind man
2) Johnny Truant, a thirty-something druggie
3) The "editors"

Johnny's friend, Lude, knows Zampano because he lives in the same apartment building. The old man, ominously, tells Lude he's going to die soon, and does. After the body is gone, Lude and Johnny sneak into the apartment to take a look around at Zampano's things. They find a crazy manuscript, which Johnny takes home with him.

The manuscript is a non-fiction book/dissertation about a documentary called "The Navidson Record." The Navidson Record is about a famous photojournalist named Will Navidson and his family moving into a new house that is bigger on the inside. When I say non-fiction, I mean it. It reads like a textbook. On every page there are footnotes about other articles and other books that reference this documentary that, by all accounts, doesn't exist (I'll get to this in a second).

It starts out simple at first. After the family returns home from vacation they notice a hallway on the second floor connecting two bedrooms that wasn't there before. They track down a blueprint of the building and see that there is a space between the walls, although it's not supposed to be a finished hallway with doors. Okay, no big deal, maybe they didn't notice the doors before, it's a new house after all and they had just moved in before going on vacation. Then comes the realization that measuring the house through that hallway results in an extra inch that shouldn't exist, and that can't be explained. Then a new door appears, on the first floor this time, that should lead to an empty back yard but instead leads to a long, dark hallway that extends into an endless labyrinth of cavernous, thousand-foot rooms that leads to god knows where and contains god knows what, and the exploration of this door is the main focus of the documentary.

So Johnny finds this manuscript, reads it, edits it, adds his own footnotes relating to research he's done on Zampano's life and the manuscript contents (translations of foreign phrases, for instance), but also personal tangents about his own life and stream of consciousness ramblings. In the prologue where he explains how he found the manuscript, he also says that The Navidson Record doesn't actually exist. Johnny's editors also appear in footnotes and in the first say they have never met Johnny Truant in person, only communicating via letters and rare phone calls. Weird, right?

What follows is 528 pages of an interwoven, multi-layered story. On the one hand, you have Zampano's non-fiction book about this fictitious documentary, which simmers as a slow-paced "found-footage" horror novel that can be unsettling, thought-provoking, but is likely to disappoint hardcore horror fans looking for adrenaline-pumping scares.

Then you have Johnny's story, told through long footnotes, which is more vague and slow to reveal itself, but the basic idea is that although he knows the manuscript is fiction, the act of reading it causes him to lose his marbles. Whether the manuscript or Johnny's brain chemistry is to blame is up to the reader. Whether Johnny is even telling the truth is up to the reader. And, to be honest, Johnny's parts can sometimes be hard to read because he's just pitiable and depressing and the stream of consciousness prose can wear down your focus. It gets Joyce-esque at times, though only for short stretches, because Danielewski is a nice man who wants you to have a good time, unlike Joyce, who hates you and hates fun. Then the "story" part ends, and you have 130 pages of appendices (which you should read) which include things like:

Zampano's writings which are not a part of The Navidson Record
The obituary of Johnny's dad
Childhood letters from Johnny's crazy, institutionalized, long dead mother
Poems

So what does it all mean?

Well, it means a clever and perhaps over-educated man named Mark Danielewski decided to write a novel that experiments with the format of the novel, that pushes the boundaries of what a novel can be and what it can do. While much of it could quite fairly be called a gimmick, and it won't be redefining how all novels are written going forward, it's a gimmick that works, that is unique, that is stimulating, that is discussion-worthy, that makes the world more interesting by existing, and isn't that what good art is supposed to do? It is an unmitigated success at being singular, and because it is singular it will inspire intense love and intense hatred from different people.

It means that while there are answers, you will have to work for them. I mean this both figuratively and literally. On the literal side, there is a letter in the appendices that is written in a simple code, which you will have to translate into a coherent message with pen and paper. And that's a code that is plainly said to be a code. There are other codes that are truly hidden.

Many sections have weird, cluttered layouts that make the act of reading them hard, and make tracking down the right footnote a scavenger hunt. You'll be presented with footnotes that make no sense until you realize the text is broken up over several pages and presented backwards. There are a lot of elements to the story, little throwaway lines and facts that you need to remember, or write down. How did Johnny's dad die. How did Navidson's dad die. Stuff like that. While it's not absolutely necessary, I'd recommend having a notebook handy starting on page one. I have an amazing memory, took notes here and there, and still wish I'd taken more. Like I said, this book is work. It's fun work though, depending on your tastes and personality. I'm an INTP and I loved it. Your mileage may vary.

On the figurative side, the book still won't hold your hand and spell out what it all means in flashing neon. That's up to you to figure out by gathering all the evidence together and deconstructing the book on several different levels by asking yourself what's true and what isn't, what matters and what doesn't, what's literal and what's figurative, what's the metanarrative, what's the subtext. Ultimately it's up to you to decide when you're satisfied with your answer.

While this is nowhere near as open to interpretation as most books you'd label as post-modern or modernist, it is still open to interpretation compared to a typical novel, which isn't open to interpretation at all. There are no easy answers, no definitive answers, but there are satisfying answers that I firmly believe are more or less what the author intended, if you're willing to put in the effort to discover them and have a flexible mind that delights in abstract concepts. Alternatively there are, of course, existing breakdowns of it on the internet that you can turn to for some help, although none I've read have gone far enough into speculation. They present facts and evidence, point out what's true or not, but none of them have drawn the kind of final conclusion that I've drawn. That's how it should be. You should decide for yourself. If none of this sounds like fun to you, I recommend giving this one a pass

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The Goodfellow

A review from the trenches, 14 years later...

Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2017

Verified Purchase

This book came into my possession in 2003. I was stationed in Iraq, hanging out with a battle buddy. He and I were hanging out in the recreation tent at Baghdad International Airport (BIAP, aka Camp Sather) watching DVDs and perusing books. Sam, my battle buddy, hands me a battered copy of this book, and says, "I tried reading this-- but I think it's more your speed."

We parted ways in November. I was headed home, he went to another location. I was on a layover at an airbase in Al Udeid when I started reading this book.

And by "reading this book", I meant devouring it, like Bastian did as he holed himself in the attic of his primary school, surrounded by food, covered in a rough blanket, sequestered from the rest of the world, pouring through a mighty tome about a story without an end.

I didn't put the book down save to sleep and trek out to the latrine to do what needed to be done every few hours or so. I usually burn through a book in a few hours, but this one demanded time and attention, lest I run over vital. I was taken by the unreliable narrator of Johnny Truant, and I was enthralled by the journey Navidson endured in reclaiming his life from the horrifying macguffin that was the house his family lived in (and people died horribly in).

Navy and Johnny were two sides of the same coin, bound together by the mysterious scratches of a dead, Milton-esque man. Their stories were so disparate and yet so interconnected. The fabric between them was everywhere from rough and roughly hewn to diaphanous and metaphysical. The footnotes of footnotes were layers upon layers -- toying with the reality in which the contents of the book existed. Rules were set up and broken, and yet, everything was cohesive as long as the reader had the endurance to follow along.

I've seen a LOT of the One-Star reviews complain that they weren't snagged within the first 100 pages. Pity-- Not everything is a slamming action-fast-paced piece of NASCAR fiction that grabs one by the genitals and rips them off in the first two pages. If you aren't in for the slow burn, then the first five words of the book ring true:

This is not for you.

House of Leaves became a seminal event in my life when I finished reading it. The darkness in my life, punctuated with walking away from a war with my life and body in tact, became that much clearer from the light-- and I somehow began finding awe and inspiration with greater ease. Some have said that it's a story about people coming to grips with loneliness and/or depression. Some have said it's a love story.

No one is wrong in their discovery. The only wrong that may be done is to criticize a book unread.

To that end, I've ended up buying different copies of this book, like a madman collecting any copy of JD Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" they could get their hands on, or a person who absolutely could not would not leave the house without a pair of gloves to shield their hands from the world. Whenever I mentioned the book to a friend, they usually ended up being the recipient of the copy I bought.

The original copy I received, the one Sam gave me, is in a fireproof safe. Well-worn with a hand-written note scribbled on the front page, I refuse to part with it. But at this point, I'm considering buying a new copy so that I can read it again.

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Humberto

UN LIBRO FUERA DE LO ORDINARIO

Reviewed in Mexico on December 26, 2023

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Si te agrada el tipo de película o lectura estílo DARK o EFECTO MARIPOSA te encantará leer éste libro que no esta organizado tradicionalmente

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andre

Bem diferente

Reviewed in Brazil on December 1, 2023

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Você sabe o que está pegando acredito: um livro diferente, que precisa ficar girando o mesmo para ler (isso foi estranho...) com uma historia contad por mais de uma pessoa em um nó bem interessante.
As notas de rodapé ganham vida de uma forma inesperada, e vão andando entre historias chatas e bestas ou relevantes, para então viajar em partes que realisticamente ninguém vai ler. Compreendo, é o estilo, é a ideia. Um labirinto estranho e confuso.

Farei claro uma segunda leitura breve. Gostei, mas na primeira leitura deixei algumas notas além do que deveria por traz, e após o final quero ver isso tudo com um ponto de vista diferente.

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Fraser Simons

Completely Unique

Reviewed in Canada on April 3, 2022

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A mirror to the reader that presents the simulacrum of multiple stories, House of Leaves is probably the most subjective book I've ever read. I loved the experience of reading this book. And make no mistake: you must choose how to read it. More questions than answers or perhaps even a narrative, the book presents a multilayered facsimile of a few different kinds of fiction. So my review is as the book intends. Merely my own reading and far more reflective of what I saw of myself while consuming it, than of anything else. This book makes space for a plethora of different kinds of readings. And I studied the text as much as I was able, tabbing and underlining and making marginalia to see if it does support my reading. And it does, I think. I'm going to be brief because I'm doing a video review on my Youtube that will be much more in-depth.

Borgesque in its "main" narrative, The Navidson Tapes presents itself as academic criticism of a cult film that does not exist. In its granularity, this reader found that there was a very meaningful difference between consuming a film and reading the piece about the film that retreads every shot composition and feeling, every visual perception, endowing it with something beyond the film could hope to convey in a viewing. As a visual thinker, the film was even richer and textured and my comprehension of it so augmented, that I think it's a far superior experience. If watching it even were such an option.

We follow the Navidson's, Will and Karen, children: Chad and Daisy, put down "roots" in Virginia. Only their colonization of the property is inverted, and the house colonizers Will, the patriarch and famous war-time photographer that sets aside his exploration to be with his family. Only, after the family is settled, the house changes, given new space--altering its dimensions in a literal sense--growing to accommodate Will's primordial self. His maze. Or labyrinth. The journey is literalized just as he believes he's completed every journey and there is nothing left but to conquer being a father. The family finds a door to a hallway to a great foyer to a spiral staircase to a maze. This causes a rift in the couple Karen, who has claustrophobia and is too afraid to enter it, and Will, who sees the next adventure and finds it irresistible. What follows is the horror of a space reflective of the people traversing it, ostensibly, but I believe more of Will's internal selfhood, and by extension humanity. And from the wreckage of the horror of trying to navigate this maze, a movie is (fictitiously) created.

The movie's critical evaluation is done by a man named Zampano, who dies at an old age after becoming obsessed with the film. Researching every thematic linkage and creating his own reading. Another horror that reflects himself, driving him literally mad, or so it would seem.

Because the actual person who compiled Zampano's work is Johnny Truant. A fake name, fake person, steeped in fiction that obfuscates his own trauma hidden in the footnotes in the critical analysis Zampano had written. Literally interrupting and resisting the spiral of Navidson's narrative into the maze, as well as Zampano's dark and turbulent thoughts that similarly spiraled. Johnny's story is mostly of self-aggrandizement and sexual exploits and chemical debauchery. Generally interceding when we reach points in the Navidson narrative that trigger his trauma, though he is only aware of the metaphor he has created which haunts and dogs him, as he becomes more like Zampano. Reclusive and colonized by the reading of the Navidson story. Rather than process their trauma, see only darkness and are ultimately consumed by it.

Depending on what you believe "actually" happens in the narrative, anyway.

I think the key themes in the book are trauma and colonization. They're hit on the head the most, in every prose craft fashion. Metaphor, allegory, symbolism. Everything seems to me, to point to the idea of patterns colonizing minds doomed to trace the same doomed lines on every layer of the fiction, regardless of whoever and however they consumed them. Everyone needs other people to feed them information outside of their own darkroom to truly see themselves. And without outside intercession, I think we all wander our own internal maze, whether we are aware of it or not. More so for people who carry trauma, who seem to have more darkness and less light to navigate the labyrinth.

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Cliente Amazon

Great

Reviewed in Spain on January 9, 2024

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Genial. Lástima que no tenga ni idea de inglés.

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Philip

Book is 10/10

Reviewed in Germany on December 27, 2023

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The book came in perfect condition and in English as well, my brother loves the book

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