[.ca] House of Leaves: The Remastered Full-Color Edition (ISBN 0375703764)

From Amazon.com:
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

The thickest, most meaningless, plotless book:
This book is divided into two story lines which have been integrated. First, there is the story about a house which expands and shrinks with no apparent reason (the author provides no explanation for this illogical transformation at all). The characters in the house explore the ever expanding and changing part of the house and though each exploration is short, long documentary types of explanation and analysis are given by an enormous amount of imaginative scholars. To give this book a sense of complication and a different twist, a second part of a story line has been incorporated. This part is about a man reading the first story line and becoming psychologically disturbed by it. I had some expectations for this book and support the experimental spirit of the author. However, the long sophisticated documentaries of a few pointless, unexplained explorations of a house and the ever deteriorating words coming from a confused narrative was not interesting at all. This book has tricked the reader's precious time by keeping the storyline complicated; yet it is pointless and plotless and no explanation or ending are ever given. It is one of the worst book I have ever read.

A challenge:
This may be the most complicated book I've ever read. There are layers upon layers and you can never be sure what's real and what isn't. I won't say it's the best book I've ever read, but it's certainly the most ambitious and creative. The way the typography was used alone is unlike anything I've ever seen. It could have been simply a gimmick, but it really reflects the story as well. A quick hint to people who like to read while doing something else--this is NOT the book for it. I took it with me to the gym and tried to read it while riding an exercise bike. Not a pretty sight.

"Good, but...":
Have read through this a few times now. Walks a thin line between intellectual commentary and pretentious drek. If you can get past the Literature-thesis-project-on-acid feel of the book, the stories do work fairly well together. Wrapping a passible suspense story inside a paranoid descent and fleshing it out with some characters who at times intimately reveal aspects of themselves, the author does manage to tell as much with the gaps and discrepancies as with the stories themselves.

METAFICTION AT ITS BEST:
A totally engrossing piece of meta-fiction. I loved this book, from beginning to end, though the Johnny Truant foot-notes passages were often boring.

Had potential to be really cool.:
This book is basically divided in two parts. As you know from the reviews below, I wont get into the details of it. I would of rated it a 5 for the house story of it, but I couldnt get past 100 pages of this because of the crassness and sexual explicit material from the words of Johnny.